How Arquà Petrarca was built and evolved over time

Arquà is built up a slope of the Euganean Hills, which are volcanic — cones and lava flows rising from the Padovan-Venetian plain — and the local trachyte is the building stone of the whole range.

The village has two centres rather than one, which is the thing a visitor notices first: an upper piazza by the parish church and a lower one around Petrarch's tomb, with a stepped street between them. That arrangement is medieval and essentially unaltered, which is why the village reads as a whole rather than as a set of monuments.

Older still, and invisible: the Laghetto della Costa inside the comune holds a prehistoric pile-dwelling settlement, inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 as part of the Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps. The houses that give the site its name stood on posts driven into the lake bed.