How Was Asolo Built

The town's fabric is modest and coherent: brick and stucco, continuous arcades along the main streets, and facades that were once frescoed, of which faded patches survive throughout.

The Castello della Regina, Caterina Cornaro's residence, keeps its tower and part of its hall; the rest was adapted in the nineteenth century into the theatre now named for Eleonora Duse.

The Rocca on the summit is a plain, massive medieval enclosure -- walls and towers with almost nothing inside. It was built to hold the hill, not to be lived in, and the interest is entirely the position and the walk up.

Villa Barbaro at Maser is the region's real architectural event. Palladio built it in the late 1550s for the Barbaro brothers, and Veronese frescoed the interior throughout -- painted architecture, landscapes, and figures leaning through illusionistic doorways. It is the only surviving building where the two collaborated, and the interior is one of the most complete decorative schemes of the Italian Renaissance.