Learn about Asolo

Asolo occupies a hilltop in the Asolani hills, the last rise before the Venetian plain, with the Dolomites visible north and the plain running south to the lagoon. The position is the entire point of the town.

Roman Acelum, then a medieval bishopric, Asolo's defining moment came in 1489 when Venice gave the deposed Queen of Cyprus a small hill town to rule. Caterina Cornaro's court made it briefly a centre of Renaissance letters, and its literary reputation has outlasted everything else about it.

Asolo's culture is essentially literary and adopted: a queen's court, a Renaissance dialogue on love, a Victorian poet's invented verb, and two remarkable women -- an actress and a traveller -- who chose to be buried here. Very little of it originated locally, and all of it stuck.

Asolo is built along the contour of a hill, in arcaded streets that step up the slope, with a castle at one end and a fortress on the summit above. The great architectural set piece, though, is not in the town at all -- it is Palladio's Villa Barbaro at Maser.

Asolo has a temperate hill climate -- warmer and clearer than the plain below, which sits under fog for much of the winter while the town above it is often in sun.