Noale Discovery Guide

Noale is a half-day, and the reason to make it is the Rocca. A polygonal brick enceinte with corner towers, entirely surrounded by water, standing on an island in the middle of a small town -- it is a fortification of a kind that mostly did not survive elsewhere, and it is now open as a park with concerts in it through the summer.

The town around it is a compact and genuinely lived-in medieval centre: Piazza Castello under its arcades, the Torre dell'Orologio that is also the old town gate, and the separate bell tower, all within five minutes' walk.

What Noale offers a visitor is what it lacks: crowds. This is a working Veneto town twenty minutes from Venice's airport, with no tour groups, ordinary prices, and a market that is for the people who live here.

For anyone interested in motorcycles, the Aprilia name on the industrial estate outside is the town's other claim -- a small-town factory that won a great many world championships.

If you travel slowly: Noale works best as a base rather than a destination -- it is 30 minutes from Venice, 25 from Padua and 25 from Treviso by train, at a fraction of the accommodation cost.

If you want the essentials: the Rocca, Piazza Castello and the clock tower. Ninety minutes, comfortably.

If you're after local character: the weekly market in the square, and an evening under the arcades. Noale in the early evening is a small Veneto town doing exactly what small Veneto towns do.

If you want to go past the obvious: cycle. The plain here is completely flat and threaded with quiet roads and marked routes, and the ride out toward the spring-fed rivers and the villa country around Mirano and Scorzè is a good day.

Noale is a small town without a tourism economy, which changes what responsible visiting looks like here: the useful thing is simply to spend money in it -- the cafés under the arcades, the Friday market, the restaurants -- rather than to treat it as a photo stop between Venice and Padua.

The Rocca is a public park and a fragile brick monument. It is used for events, and the balance between using it and conserving it is a live local question; keeping to the paths and off the walls is the visitor's part of it.

The Marzenego and the moat system are part of the plain's spring-fed water network, which is under pressure across the middle Veneto from abstraction and agricultural run-off.

Noale sits on the flat and is well connected by train and by the regional cycle network -- arriving without a car is genuinely easy here, which is not true of most of the places in this region.

May, June and September are the best: warm, and the Rocca's summer programme of concerts and open-air events is running.

July and August are hot and humid on the plain, and quiet -- much of the town is away.

Spring and autumn are the best for cycling, which is the main outdoor activity here.

Winter is cold and foggy and the town is at its quietest, though the centre is small enough to see in any weather and the arcades help.

Noale is a year-round working town rather than a seasonal one, so nothing closes in the way it does on the coast.

What a visitor actually spends in Noale