vigevano
 
An hour by bus to the west of Pavia, VIGÉVANO is Lombardy at its most comfortably wealthy, a smug little town of boutiques, antiques dealers and - most significantly - shoe shops. The shoe industry is Vigévano's mainstay, and there are signs of the bedrock of the town's prosperity all over the centre. If you go on a Sunday, Italy's only shoe museum is open on Corso Cavour (10.30am-12.30pm & 3-6pm; closed Aug & Dec), with a collection of some of the weirdest and wackiest excesses of shoe design in the country.

As for the town itself, most of it is pretty unremarkable, and there'd be little reason to visit were it not for the Piazza Ducale , which is something special, surrounded on three sides by well-preserved and delicately frescoed arcades, the embodiment of Renaissance harmony. Designed by Bramante and heavily influenced by Leonardo, even the Baroque front of the Duomo doesn't spoil the proportions, deftly curved to conceal the fact that the church is set at a slight angle to the square.

Otherwise the Castello (Tues-Sun 8.30am-1.30pm; L4000/¬2.07) is about all Vigévano has to offer. A Visconti and later Sforza stronghold now in the final throes of a lengthy restoration, the castle's still semi-dilapidated state is part of its attraction: it's largely unsupervised, especially in the mornings, which means you can go just about wherever you want, scrambling up rickety flights of steps to the upper floors, or down dank passages to the dungeons. The oldest part of the castle is the Rocca Vecchia, a fort built by the Visconti to defend the road to Milan, to which it is connected by a covered walkway. The Sforzas retained the castle's military function, but added the elegant Palazzo Ducale, still mostly unrestored, the Loggia delle Dame, an open walkway for the noblewomen's evening passeggiata, and the Falconiera, another open gallery used for the training of falcons. On the right of the courtyard, the stables (summer Mon-Fri 2-8pm, Sat & Sun 2-10pm; winter daily 2-6pm; free), designed by Leonardo, offer some insight into how the Sforza troops lived and worked - cathedral-like quarters for the horses, and a loft above for soldiers and hay.

For a good overhead view of both the Castello and the Piazza Ducale, climb the Torre del Bramante (Tues-Fri 10am-noon & 3.30-5.30pm, Sat & Sun 10am-12.30pm & 2.30-6.30pm; L2500/¬1.29), a tower that was begun in 1198, before the Castello, and completed by Bramante at the end of the fifteenth century. The entrance is next to that of the Castello.