How Was The Valpolicella Wine Region Built

The structural element of the landscape is the marogna -- the dry-stone terrace wall, built from the limestone cleared off the slope it holds up. Thousands of kilometres of them shape every valley here.

Farms are built as courts, with the fruttaio -- the drying loft -- as the tall, through-ventilated upper floor, which is why old Valpolicella farmhouses look top-heavy.

The Pieve di San Giorgio is the oldest surviving architecture: a Romanesque church of the eleventh and twelfth centuries on a much earlier site, with a small cloister and a carved ciborium of 712 from the Lombard period.

Villa della Torre at Fumane, of the mid-sixteenth century and associated with Giulio Romano and Michele Sanmicheli, is the region's architectural oddity: a house built around a Roman-style atrium, with fireplaces carved as gaping monstrous mouths.

Villa Serego at Pedemonte was begun to Palladio's design and never finished; what stands -- a colonnade of massive rusticated drums -- is unlike anything else he built.