Discover Palazzo della Ragione

A huge medieval hall raised on an open market arcade between two squares, with loggias running down both long sides and a roof shaped like an upturned boat hull. The interior is one unbroken room the length of the building, with no columns in it — the walls carry frescoed panels in rows from floor to roof, and a wooden horse stands at one end.

The hall measures roughly 81 metres long, 27 wide and 27 high, and its timber roof -- shaped like an inverted ship's hull -- spans the whole of that without a single interior support. It is the reason the building is significant: a medieval structure solving a problem of scale that most contemporaries simply avoided.

The roof form is boat-building logic applied to a room, which in a region of shipwrights is less surprising than it first appears. Loggias run along both long sides, added in the 14th century, giving the upper floor light and the market below its arcades.

At ground level, Sotto il Salone is a continuous vaulted arcade occupied by butchers, cheesemongers and salumerie. It is architecturally the plainest part of the building and by some distance the busiest.