Italy Guide
Trentino-Alto Adige
Piazza Duomo
Trento was known as Tridentum to the Romans, a name celebrated by the eighteenth-century Neptune fountain in the central Piazza Duomo, which gives onto streets – notably Via Belanzani – lined with frescoed palaces, many of them built in the sixteenth century when Trento was an important market town.
The three most significant meetings of the Council of Trent – convened to confront the growth of Protestantism and to establish the so-called Counter Reformation – took place in the Duomo between 1545 and 1563. The building itself was begun in the thirteenth century, but wasn't completed until the sixteenth. Inside, an enormous carved marble baldachin over the altar is a replica of the one in St Peter's, Rome. The most interesting part of the building lies under the church, where a medieval crypt and foundations of an early Christian basilica (built over the tomb of St Vigilio, the third bishop of Trento) were discovered in 1977.