Cittadella Culture

What Cittadella has is continuity of plan. The 1220 layout -- two streets crossing at right angles inside an ellipse, four gates on the axes -- is still the town's street map, and daily life still runs along it. Very few planned medieval towns survive this legibly anywhere in Europe.

The Saturday market has been held inside the walls since the middle ages and remains the commercial event of the week for the surrounding countryside.

Historical re-enactment is a real local tradition, with medieval festivals using the walls and gates as their setting -- less polished than Marostica's chess game, and correspondingly less staged.

The food is straightforward Veneto plain cooking: polenta, duck and guinea fowl, radicchio in winter, and the local wines of the Breganze hills to the north-west.