Vicenza historical timeline

Vicenza has been rebuilt on the same wedge of ground more than once, and the wedge is the reason. The Bacchiglione and the Retrone meet at the eastern end of the centre, and the land between them is what the Romans laid out, what the medieval commune walled, and what the Venetian centuries filled with the buildings the city is now known for. Nothing moved sideways; each rebuilding sits on top of the last. The clearest proof of that is under Piazza Duomo, where the covered corridor of a Roman house came to light only because Allied bombing took away the buildings standing over it.

Chronology

1. 157 B.C. Vicetia is a Roman centre in its own right, on the plain between the two rivers. What survives of it lies under the later city rather than beside it: the forum below Palazzo Trissino, the theatre out at Berga, the aqueduct at Lobbia.
2. 1001 Otto III hands the government of the city to its bishop. Authority settles at the cathedral end of the centre for the next three centuries, which is why the institutional weight of medieval Vicenza sits around Piazza Duomo and not around the market square.
3. 1311 Vicenza submits to the Scaligeri of Verona. They give the city its fourteenth-century walls and turn the bell tower of Santi Felice e Fortunato into a fortified one -- the walls still draw the edge of the centre, and that tower is the most conspicuous thing they left standing in it.
4. 1404 Vicenza passes to the Republic of Venice, and stays Venetian for 393 years. The stability, and the landowning families who wanted it advertised, are what produced the demand a single architect would spend a career meeting.
5. 1546 The city council approves Andrea Palladio's scheme for the structurally failing Palazzo della Ragione. Work on the loggias begins in May 1549 and is not finished until 1614, thirty years after his death. The Basilica Palladiana is a classical skin fitted around a crooked medieval box, and it is why Piazza dei Signori looks the way it does.
6. 1570 Palladio publishes I quattro libri dell'architettura in Venice. Its plates are largely of buildings standing in and around Vicenza, which is why the city reads as the catalogue of a style rather than as a town that once hired a good architect.
7. 1580 The Teatro Olimpico is begun in February; Palladio dies that August and Vincenzo Scamozzi completes it. It opens on 3 March 1585 with Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and the forced-perspective streets Scamozzi built for that one night were never taken down.
8. 1797 The Venetian Republic falls, and Vicenza goes with it -- to a French duchy, then to the Austrian Empire from 1814. The city stops being a provincial capital that builds and becomes one that is administered, which is why so little of the centre is later than Palladio.
9. 1944 Allied bombing leaves Vicenza the most damaged city in the Veneto. The raid of 17-18 November kills more than 500 in the San Bortolo quarter alone; the campaign runs from Christmas night 1943 to the spring of 1945 and costs over 2,000 civilian lives.
10. 1994 UNESCO inscribes the city, extending the listing in 1996 to the Palladian villas across the Veneto. It is why the centre's facades are now maintained as one set rather than building by building.

What survived, and how

The centre standing today is substantially a reconstruction. The worst single loss among the monuments came on 18 March 1945, when an incendiary bomb destroyed the original roof of the Basilica Palladiana; it was rebuilt in its old form immediately after the war, with the timber given by the Altopiano dei Sette Comuni. The bombing also did the city one accidental service. Clearing the buildings on Piazza Duomo exposed the cryptoporticus of a Roman house that had been sitting under the square unrecorded, and it is now the most complete Roman interior a visitor can walk into here.

Water is the standing threat rather than fire. Between 31 October and 2 November 2010 the Bacchiglione and the Retrone both broke their banks and put roughly a fifth of Vicenza under water; the breach at Ponte degli Angeli cut the eastern approach to the historic centre. The municipality counted some 6.5 million euro of damage to monuments, roads and public buildings.