How Was Conegliano Built

Via XX Settembre is a single architectural gesture repeated for several hundred metres: continuous porticoes on both sides, carrying the upper floors on columns and arches. As in Treviso and Padua, this gave shops covered frontage and pushed the decorated facades up a storey -- which is where the surviving frescoes are.

The Duomo is unusual in having almost no facade of its own. It sits behind the arcade, and the frescoed front you see from the street belongs to the confraternity building in front of it; the church is effectively hidden behind a row of shops.

The Sala dei Battuti, the confraternity hall above that portico, is covered floor to ceiling with sixteenth-century frescoes -- a complete decorated interior of a kind that usually did not survive.

Out in the hills, the ciglioni are the real engineering: narrow grassed earth terraces, held by their own turf rather than by stone walls, cut into slopes of 30 degrees and more. They cannot be worked mechanically and they need constant repair, which is precisely the fragility UNESCO cited.