Piazza Maggiore Historical Timeline

Origins

Feltre stands on a hill above the Piave valley and has been fortified since antiquity; the square occupies the high ground beneath the castle.

Turning points

In 1510, during the wars of the League of Cambrai, imperial troops sacked and burned Feltre. The destruction was near-total, and the town that stands today is the one rebuilt immediately afterwards.

Influential people

The rebuilding is why Feltre looks the way it does: a single coherent sixteenth-century town, rather than the usual accumulation of centuries, with frescoed facades in the fashion of the moment.

Cultural evolution

Tullio Lombardo, of the Venetian family of sculptor-architects, made the square's fountain in 1520 -- a mark of the Venetian investment that followed the destruction.

Present-day significance

The square remains Feltre's civic centre and the setting for the town's Palio, held each August.