Piazza del Popolo

Piazza del Popolo has served as Ravenna's civic centre for more than seven centuries. Two granite columns raised under Venetian rule stand beside the town hall, and zodiac signs are carved in the square's stonework.

Why it matters

The piazza is the civic counterweight to Ravenna's religious monuments: since the second half of the thirteenth century it has concentrated the seats of power, first the da Polenta lords, then the town hall and the papal legation whose palace now serves as the prefecture. Reshaped when Venice governed the city and modelled openly on the Piazza San Marco, it keeps that republic's signature pair of columns, a Renaissance clock of light on a column base, and the memory of a river that once ran where the cafés now stand. Its monuments reflect successive chapters in Ravenna's political history.

What to notice

The two granite columns of 1483 were raised when the Venetians filled in the Padenna river and widened the square. Their bases are attributed to Pietro Lombardo, and one carries the inscription Opus Petri Lombardi 1483. Zodiac reliefs include Ophiuchus and an image of Hercules with a sundial shell. One column originally bore the lion of Saint Mark; after Pope Julius II took the city in 1509, the Venetian emblems were removed. The columns now bear statues of Saint Apollinaris and Saint Vitalis, the latter by Clemente Molli. A meridian line engraved on the San Vitale column in 1793 marks Ravenna's noon according to Italian-hours reckoning. The square's buildings include the crenellated Palazzo Comunale, rebuilt in 1681 and enlarged from 1761, the former Apostolic Palace of the legates, and the clock-tower palace that housed the city's first cinema.

Context and history

The square began as an open space along the Padenna in the decades of da Polenta rule, and its modern geometry dates to the Venetian governorship of 1441 onward, when the river was covered and the piazza expanded toward the model of Venice's own. The fall of the Serenissima here in 1509 began the long papal period that rebuilt the town hall and the legation palace. Commerce and ceremony kept the square at the centre: markets, proclamations and public clocks all answered to it, regulated against the meridian engraved by the column in 1793. In 1946 the citizens gave the square its present name: after the institutional referendum, when more than eighty-eight per cent of Ravenna voted for the republic, the highest share in Italy, the piazza was renamed Piazza del Popolo, the People's Square, in place of its royal dedication.