How Was Soave Built

The walls are the town's architecture. Built in 1369 in brick and stone with twenty-four towers and Ghibelline swallowtail merlons, they run from the castle down both sides of the hill and close around the town on the flat -- a complete circuit, which is the rare part.

The Castello Scaligero sits at the top: three courtyards rising to a keep, on foundations older than the Scaligeri work, restored in the nineteenth century by the Veronese senator Giulio Camuzzoni, who bought it as a ruin.

Inside the walls the town is a small grid on the Roman road alignment, with Piazza Antenna at its centre.

The Venetian Gothic palaces on Via Roma -- the Palazzo di Giustizia and the Palazzo Cavalli -- date from the fifteenth century and are what Venetian rule added: pointed windows and balconies in a town that had been purely military.