Italy Guide
The Veneto
The Piazza dei Signori
At the hub of the city, the Piazza dei Signori, stands the most awesome of Palladio's creations – the basilica. Designed in the late 1540s (but not finished until almost seventy years later), this was Palladio's first public project and the one that secured his reputation. The monumental regularity of the basilica disguises the fact that the Palladian building is effectively a stupendous piece of buttressing – the Doric and Ionic colonnades enclose the fifteenth-century hall of the city council, an unstable structure that had defied all previous attempts to prop it up. The vast Gothic hall is often used for contemporary architecture exhibitions. On Tuesdays and Thursdays a vast market fills the streets between the basilica and the Duomo, though if you're shopping for picnic food, you'll save money by going down the slope and over the river, where the shops are a good bit cheaper.