Treviso Discovery Guide

Treviso is what people imagine Venice was like before it filled up. It has canals, frescoed facades, arcaded streets and a fish market on an island, and on a Tuesday morning it has almost no visitors at all -- despite two million-odd passengers a year landing at its airport and getting straight on a bus to somewhere else.

It is also a food city with an unusually specific claim to fame. Radicchio rosso di Treviso is grown in the fields around it and forced in spring water through the winter; tiramisù was, by the best-documented account, invented here in the 1970s at a restaurant a few streets from the main square.

And it is the gateway to the Prosecco hills, which begin twenty minutes north. Treviso makes a far cheaper and more pleasant base for them than anywhere in the hills themselves.

If you travel slowly: two nights lets you give a day to the city and a day to the Sile or the Prosecco hills. Treviso is small enough to exhaust in an afternoon and pleasant enough that you will not want to.

If you want the essentials: Piazza dei Signori, the arcaded run of Calmaggiore to the Duomo, the fish market island, and the walk along the top of the Venetian walls. That is a morning, and it covers most of what the city is.

If you're after local character: the ombra -- a small glass of wine standing at a bar, taken in the late morning or before dinner -- is a genuine Treviso institution, and the bars around the Pescheria are where it happens.

If you want to go past the obvious: the Seminary chapter house next to San Nicolò holds Tomaso da Modena's forty Dominicans of 1352, one of which wears the earliest known depiction of eyeglasses in Western art. It is almost always empty.

Treviso's problem is that it is a transit point rather than a destination. Its airport is one of the busiest in the Veneto and almost every arriving passenger leaves immediately for Venice, so the city carries the environmental cost of the traffic and sees little of the benefit. Spending even one night here changes that arithmetic more than anything else a visitor can do.

The Sile is the constraint that matters environmentally. It is a spring-fed river -- a risorgiva, rising from the ground rather than the mountains -- and its flow and temperature are unusually stable, which is why it supports species that have gone elsewhere in the Po basin. The regional park along it asks people to stay on the Restera towpath and off the banks.

Radicchio has a real season, roughly November to February, and the forced late variety is genuinely a winter product. Anything sold as Treviso radicchio in July came from somewhere else.

The city is small and flat and its centre is largely restricted to traffic; walking or cycling is not a sacrifice here, it is simply what works.

April to June and September to October are the best months: mild, the canalside is at its most pleasant, and the Prosecco hills and the Sile are both comfortable to walk.

Winter has a specific argument in its favour that no other season does. Radicchio di Treviso is a winter crop, the tardivo harvested from late November, and the food between December and February is the reason to come then. It is cold and foggy, and the fog on the canals is genuinely atmospheric.

Summer is hot, humid and still, in the way Po plain cities are. The arcades help more than they sound like they would, and the city empties in August.

Grape harvest in the hills to the north runs from late August into September, which is the liveliest time to visit the Prosecco country from a Treviso base.

What a visitor actually spends in Treviso

Treviso costs noticeably less than Venice for the same night, which is the main practical reason people base themselves here -- the train to Venice takes half an hour and runs constantly.