Noale Culture

The Rocca functions as the town's living room. It is not a museum piece behind a barrier but a public park, used for concerts, open-air cinema and events through the summer, which is an unusually sensible thing to do with a medieval fortress.

Piazza Castello and its arcades are where the ordinary social life happens -- the market, the passeggiata, the cafés. Noale has no tourist quarter, so this is simply the town.

Aprilia is the modern local identity. A factory in a town of sixteen thousand people that won a long series of world championships is a genuine source of local pride, and the marque's history is bound up with the place.

The food is central Veneto: bigoli, duck and guinea fowl, radicchio from the surrounding fields, freshwater fish from the spring-fed rivers, and the wines of the Piave and the Colli.

The dialect here is Venetian of the mainland, and it is what you will hear in the market.