feltre
 
 
 
The historic centre of FELTRE , spread along a narrow ridge overlooking the modern town, owes its beguiling appearance to the calamity of 1509, when, in the course of the War of the League of Cambrai, the troops of the Imperial Army decided to punish the place for its allegiance to Venice by wiping much of it from the face of the planet. The Venetians took care of the reconstruction, and within a few decades the streets looked pretty much as they do nowadays. You're not going to find architecture students on every street corner, but you'd have to travel a long way to get a better idea of how an ordinary town looked in sixteenth-century Italy.

There are no direct trains to Feltre from Venice, but Feltre is a stop for the twelve- daily Padua-to-Belluno trains, which you can intercept at Castelfranco. The journey from Padua to Feltre takes ninety minutes, and it's a further thirty to Belluno.

From the station the shortest route to the old town is to cross straight over into Viale del Piave, over Via Garibaldi (where there's a decent range of bars, restaurants and hotels) and along Via Castaldi, which brings you to the Duomo and Baptistry , at the foot of the ridge. The main objects of interest in the duomo are a sixth-century Byzantine cross and a tomb by Tullio Lombardo. At the top of the steps that go past the side of the baptistry, on the other side of the road, is the town's south gate, under which begins a long covered flight of steps that takes you up into the heart of the old town. You come out by the sixteenth-century Municipio , the portico of which was designed by Palladio. The keep of the medieval castello rises behind the platform of the Piazza Maggiore .

To the left, the main street of Feltre, Via Mezzaterra , slopes down to the fifteenth-century Porta Imperiale. Nearly all the houses here are sixteenth century, and several have external frescoes by the town's most important painter, Lorenzo Luzzo - better known as Il Morto da Feltre (The Dead Man), a nickname prompted by the pallor of his skin. Via L. Luzzo, the equally decorous continuation of Via Mezzaterra on the other side of the piazza, leads to the Museo Civico (Tues-Sun 10am-1pm & 3-6pm; L8000/¬4.13), which contains Il Morto's Madonna with SS Vitus and Modestus and other pieces by him, plus paintings by Cima and Gentile Bellini and a display of Roman and Etruscan finds. Il Morto's finest work is generally held to be the fresco of the Transfiguration in the Ognissanti church; this building is unlikely to be open in the foreseeable future, but if you want to try your luck, go out of the Porta Oria, right by the Museo Civico, down the dip and along Borgo Ruga for a couple of hundred metres.

Feltre has another, more unusual museum - the Museo Rizzarda at Via del Paradiso 8, parallel to Via Mezzaterra (June-Sept Tues-Sun 10am-1pm & 4-7pm; L3000/¬1.55). This doubles as the town's collection of modern art and an exhibition of wrought-iron work, most of it by Carlo Rizzarda (1883-1931), ex-owner of the house. This is more appealing than it sounds, rescued by the remarkable finesse of Rizzarda's pieces.