Castelfranco Veneto

The name says exactly how it was born. At the end of the twelfth century the comune of Treviso built a castle here to guard the border with Padua and Vicenza, and in 1199 sent in a hundred families of free men, granting them farms and houses exempt from taxes and burdens: castello franco, a castle free of taxes. Hence a population made not of soldiers but of citizens, and an odd plan, with no real square, the church, the accounting office and the infirmary strung along the main street. It was governed by two consuls who held office for six months, and each of them had to answer to the other for what he did, and to act against him if he broke the law.

Within those crenellated walls, around 1477, Giorgione was born: his altarpiece in the cathedral, with its high throne and dreaming landscape, is one of the thresholds of modern painting, and the house tradition gives him now holds the museum. In 1339 Castelfranco had passed to Venice along with Treviso, and under the Serenissima it had its best time: the market on the castle's north side, divided between livestock and grain, the arcades and warehouses at ground level, the patricians' villas out in the country — and little by little the town cut its ties with Treviso and went its own way. The Teatro Accademico, an eighteenth-century jewel of velvet, is owed to the intellectuals of those families. Outside the walls are the cafés of the square; on the table, the variegated radicchio of Castelfranco, the rose you can eat. Treviso and Padua are twenty minutes away.