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Straddling the Adige Valley, TRENTO , just three hours from Venice by train, is a quiet provincial centre that makes one of the best bases for exploring the region, not least because of its bus services to the mountains. Overshadowed by Monte Bondone, it's beautifully sited too, encircled by mountains and exuding a relaxed pace of life. It wasn't always so, however. From the tenth to the eighteenth centuries, Trento was a powerful bishopric ruled by a dynasty of princes; it was the venue of the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, when the Catholic Church, threatened by the Reformation in northern Europe, met to plan its countermeasures - meetings that spanned a total of eighteen years. Later, throughout the nineteenth century, ownership of the city, which remained in Austrian hands, was hotly contested, and it only became properly part of Italy in 1918, after the conclusion of World War I.
The Town
Trento was known as Tridentum to the Romans, a name celebrated by the eighteenth-century Neptune fountain in the central Piazza Duomo , a pleasant square ringed by arcades, shops and cafés and giving onto streets lined with frescoed palaces, notably via Belanziani, many of them built in the sixteenth century when Trento was an important market town. Architecture buffs might like to pick up an excellent guide to the palaces, Renaissance Trento , from the tourist information office. The three most significant meetings of the Council of Trent - convened to confront the growth of Protestantism and to establish the so-called Counter-Reformation - took place in the Duomo between 1545 and 1563. The building itself was begun in the thirteenth century, but wasn't completed until the sixteenth. Inside, the arched, colonnaded steps flanking the nave are a dramatic touch to an otherwise plain building. There are fresco fragments in the nave and an enormous carved marble baldachin over the altar - a replica of the one in St Peter's, Rome - although the most interesting part lies under the church, where a medieval crypt and foundations of an early Christian basilica (built over the tomb of St Vigilio, the third bishop of Trento) were discovered in 1977.
In the late 1970s, excavations uncovered the remains of an early Christian Basilica. The neighbouring Museo Diocesano Tridentino e Basilica Paleocristiana (Mon-Sat 9.30am-12.30pm & 2.30-6pm; L5000/?2.58), housed in the Palazzo Pretorio, includes large annotated paintings of the sessions of the Council of Trent and some carved altarpieces from the church of San Zeno in the Val di Non. Hidden away in cell-like side rooms are some ornate reliquaries and an impressive cycle of fifteenth-century Flemish tapestries. The building is appealing in itself, too, with its fishtail battlements and heavy studded doors and a view from the upper floor of the frescoed palaces around the square.
The most powerful of the Trento princes was Bernardo Clesio, who in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries built up much of the town's art collection, a good proportion of which is held in the Castello del Buonconsiglio (Tues-Sat 9am-noon & 2-5.30pm; L9000/?4.65), another venue of the Council of Trent, a short walk from Piazza Duomo on the eastern side of the town centre. It's two castles really: the thirteenth-century Castelvecchio and the extension built in 1530 called the Magno Palazzo , in which several rooms frescoed with classical subjects by the Dossi Family and Romanino lead off a quiet inner courtyard. Upstairs is the Museo Provinciale d'Arte , whose highlight is the Ciclo dei Mesi ("Cycle of the Months"), hidden at the end of a narrow passageway in the Torre d'Aquila (ask at the ticket desk to be taken there). These fifteenth-century frescoes show details from farming and courtly life and - reflecting the castle's role in the nineteenth century - soldiers confined to barracks; in a case of life imitating art, soldiers also added their own touches by scribbling on the borders and drawing in beards.
The ditch around the castle was the place of execution for two celebrated Trentese, Cesare Battisti and his comrade Fabio Filzi. Born in 1875, Battisti was a man of his times, a combination of romantic idealist and guerrilla fighter. He set up the socialist-irredentist newspaper Il Popolo as a forum for protest against Austrian rule, and used Italy's entry into World War I as an opportunity to step up his campaign to eject Austrian forces from the Tyrol. The stratagem was unsuccessful: in 1916 he led an attempt to take Monte Pasubio to the south of Trento, but he was arrested by the Austrians and shot as a traitor. You can visit his and Filzi's cells in the castle, as well as a small museum to the Risorgimento and Liberation of Trentino. |
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