Palazzo della Loggia

Brescia's town hall is a Renaissance project that took most of a century: begun in 1492, interrupted by war, resumed with advice solicited from Palladio and Sansovino, and completed only in 1574. Its Botticino-marble façade presides over Piazza della Loggia, above the deep portico that gave both palace and square their name.

Why it matters

The palace is the seat of Brescia's municipal government and a major work of Renaissance architecture on the city's principal square. Its Botticino-marble façade combines columns, pilasters and sculptural decoration. A large portico beneath the palace, enterable from three sides through three wide arches and flanked by two marble fountains, doubles as an open-air venue — the loggia that gave the building and the square their name. The palace remains part of the city's civic life.

What to notice

• The marble façade combines earlier lower orders with sculptural decoration and a late-sixteenth-century completion, all in local Botticino stone.
• The portico and fountains form a deep arcaded undercroft beneath the palace.
• The Salone Vanvitelliano is the historic council hall, alongside the Council Hall and Giunta Hall.
• The palace and square form an architectural composition with the clock tower opposite.

Context and history

The palace grew out of the fifteenth-century decision to give Venetian-ruled Brescia a proper civic centre. After a design phase in which Bramante's involvement was suggested, a wooden model was brought from Vicenza by architect Tommaso Formenton, and the first stone was blessed by Bishop Paolo Zane on 5 March 1492. The French sack of Brescia in 1512 stopped every construction site in the city — sculptures by Gasparo Cairano reportedly stood at the base of the scaffolding for some fifty years. Works resumed around 1549–50 under Lodovico Beretta, with consultations recorded from Andrea Palladio — who came to the site four times, in 1550, 1562, 1567 and 1575 — Jacopo Sansovino, Galeazzo Alessi, Jacopo Rusconi and even Titian, and the building was completed in 1574, almost a century after the first stone was blessed. Since then it has remained the city's town hall, surviving the 1974 bombing that struck the square below; a memorial stele at the tower's base commemorates its victims.