Treviso City Walls Site Features

The design is the point. Medieval walls were tall and thin, built against ladders and siege towers; cannon made them a liability. Fra Giocondo's walls are low, immensely thick and backed with earth, so shot buries itself rather than shattering masonry.

Projecting bastions at intervals are angled so that defenders on one can sweep the face of the next -- crossfire along the ditch, with no blind spots at the base of the wall. This is the trace italienne, and Treviso is an unusually early and unusually complete example of it.

A wet ditch fed from the rivers runs outside, and the whole circuit was engineered together with the waterways rather than laid on top of them.

The three surviving gates are ceremonial as well as defensive: Porta San Tomaso in particular is a piece of Venetian display architecture, with the lion of St Mark above the arch.

The bastions

Angled earth-backed platforms, walkable, and the clearest illustration anywhere of how gunpowder changed fortification.

Porta San Tomaso

The grandest of the three surviving gates, carrying the Venetian lion.

The circuit walk

A continuous green route around the historic centre, with the ditch on one side and the city on the other.

Porta Santi Quaranta and Porta Altinia

The other two gates, plainer and more purely military.

The walls define the oval of Treviso's historic centre, roughly five kilometres around, with the Sile running along the southern side and the ditch filled from the city's own waterways. The top of the rampart is planted and used as a park.