A Venetian frontier fortress built as a single geometric figure: a nine-sided bastioned trace round a hexagonal parade ground, radial streets and ring roads, three rusticated gates, palaces near the centre and humbler houses toward the walls.
In 1593 the Venetian Republic founded Palmanova in the plain of Friuli as a fortress against the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Its plan is the Renaissance ideal city made real by military engineers: a regular nine-sided polygon with an angle bastion on every corner, a hexagonal piazza at the centre, and streets radiating to the ramparts. Six streets leave the piazza, three to the gates and three to bastions; the other twelve begin at the first ring road. Scamozzi, whose Idea dell’architettura universale (1615) sets out the theory of such cities, was associated with the work, though how much of the plan is his remains disputed.
The architecture shows the Mannerist taste for strength and licence. The gates are clad in the rustic work that Serlio recommends for fortresses, rough blocks bound into a Doric order. The main streets are lined near the piazza with palaces of regular front, as in Serlio’s stage set for tragedy, and turn further out into the shops and houses of his comic scene. Round the piazza stand the cathedral, whose low bell tower was kept below the line of fire, the governor’s palace and the guard house, with the standard of the Republic at the centre.
The later outer rings of ravelins and lunettes, added in the seventeenth century and under Napoleon, are left out here. The town is drawn at about three-quarters of its real size.