Learn about Treviso

Treviso sits on the Veneto plain where spring water reaches the surface. The Sile rises from the ground west of the city rather than in the mountains, and the Botteniga is divided into canals inside the walls -- which is why a city with no lagoon and no coast is full of water.

Roman Tarvisium became a free commune, then submitted to Venice in 1339 -- the Republic's first mainland conquest, and the start of four and a half centuries as a Venetian city. Fra Giocondo walled it in the early 1500s. On Good Friday 1944 Allied bombers destroyed roughly half of it in a few minutes.

Treviso's culture is built on water, painted walls and food. It was once an urbs picta, a city whose house fronts were frescoed rather than plastered, and enough survives to change how the streets look. Its cooking has two things almost nowhere else can claim outright: radicchio rosso and tiramisù.

Treviso is built of brick, water and arcades. The porticoes along its streets are structural and continuous, the canals were engineered rather than found, and the sixteenth-century walls are an early example of fortification designed for gunpowder rather than against ladders.

Treviso has the humid climate of the Po plain -- hot, still summers and cold, foggy winters -- moderated slightly by the Alpine foothills to the north and the rivers running through it. Spring and autumn are short, mild and much the best time to be here.