Learn about Cittadella

Cittadella stands on the open plain between the Brenta and the Piave, roughly halfway between Padua and the mountains. There is no natural defensive feature here at all -- which is exactly why the walls had to be so good.

Founded by Padua in 1220 as a fortified counterweight to Treviso's Castelfranco, Cittadella was a purpose-built military town. It fell to Ezzelino da Romano, passed to the Carraresi and then to Venice in 1405, and kept its walls because no one ever had cause to remove them.

Cittadella's culture is bound up with being a fortress town: a medieval plan still lived in, a wall that residents walk on, and a market that has met inside the gates for eight hundred years. It is not a place of great art, and it does not pretend to be.

The walls are the building. An ellipse of brick 1,460 metres round and 14 metres high, with 32 towers, four gates and a wet moat -- built quickly in the thirteenth century for one purpose, and never modernised because they never needed to be.

Cittadella has the humid continental climate of the Veneto plain: hot, still summers and cold, foggy winters. The rampart is exposed in both, with no shade in summer and no shelter in winter.