How Was Treviso Built

The arcades are the city's basic building move. Streets like Calmaggiore are lined with continuous porticoes carrying the upper floors, which gave shops covered frontage and pedestrians shelter from rain and summer sun. They also mean the street facades begin a storey up, which is where the frescoes went.

The canals are deliberate engineering. The Botteniga was diverted and split inside the walls to power mills, flush waste, supply water and feed the moat. The Pescheria's island was created for the fish market specifically, so that a running current would carry away what a fish market produces -- a working sanitation decision that happens to have produced the prettiest corner of the city.

The walls are Fra Giocondo's, built 1509-1518 for the Republic after the shock of Cambrai. They are low, thick and angled, with earth-backed bastions designed to absorb cannon fire and give crossfire along the ditch -- the new Italian system of fortification, at almost its earliest. Three gates survive: San Tomaso, Santi Quaranta and Altinia.

Much of what stands inside them is post-1944 reconstruction, done in the original materials and proportions rather than in a modern idiom, which is why the centre reads as older than it largely is.