Corso Vittorio Emanuele II

Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, known in historic charters as Contrada Maggiore, runs beneath continuous porticoes past the Duomo, frescoed merchant houses, Palazzo Crescendolo Milani and the Gothic town hall.

Why it matters

The medieval Contrada Maggiore linked the river port on the Noncello with the market, and the city grew along it. Its porticoes frame frescoes recovered through the municipality's Facciate del Corso programme. The open loggia at the northern end has hosted civic ceremonies.

What to notice

The porticoes form a continuous covered walkway along both sides of the street. They frame painted facades recovered under the Facciate del Corso programme, including Palazzo Crescendolo Milani, whose frieze carries thirteen zodiac signs, including Ophiuchus. At the northern end stands the town hall loggia: an open ground floor on pointed brick arches, trapezoidal in plan, its upper hall once the granary — the fontego — where grain and weapons were stored and justice was administered. In 1542 the facade received Gothic pinnacles and a bell-topped tower designed by Pomponio Amalteo, where two figures, the "mori", still strike the hours. The cathedral and its campanile stand close at hand, the loggia's oldest neighbours in the upper town.

Context and history

The street preserves the geometry of medieval Pordenone: property lines fixed when the Contrada Maggiore was the only road that mattered, flanked by the towers and courtyards of merchant families. Its monuments read like an index of the city's institutions. The loggia, recorded from the close of the thirteenth century — 1291 is the accepted estimate — concentrated the commune's functions: grain storage, weapons, courts and assemblies, with a painting of San Marco and Justice by Alessandro Varotari (il Padovanino) added to the hall in 1626, where the city's pinacoteca also hung until the Museo civico was instituted at Palazzo Ricchieri in 1970. Later architects kept extending the complex — Cesare Scoccimarro's completion of 1928, Ignazio Cardarella's additions of 1957-1976 — while along the Corso the great houses were restored and their frescoes recovered, culminating in the municipality's Facciate del Corso programme: begun in 1991 with Fondazione Friuli and the Superintendency, it has brought back the painted facades of some three dozen houses along the street and the first stretch of Corso Garibaldi.