Piazza delle Erbe

Below the cathedral, Belluno's old market square occupies an irregular open space. Its features include a fountain bearing San Lucano, a stone Pietà, a defaced Venetian lion and a loggia that once lodged an emperor.

Why it matters

Piazza delle Erbe — still listed by the city's official itineraries under its older name of Piazza Mercato — was the commercial heart of medieval Belluno, remembered in local chronicles as the piazza di Foro. Where Piazza Duomo staged the church and Piazza dei Martiri staged the community's public life, this square staged daily exchange, and its buildings institutionalised charity and credit: the Monte di Pietà, the pawn-lending institution preached into existence to wean the poor from usurers, built its headquarters here. The result is a square whose every facade carries an argument about money, faith and civic pride, recorded in stone by the Venetian rectors who governed the city for four centuries.

What to notice

The fountain of San Lucano, dated to 1409 by a local chronicle, remains the square's centrepiece; the statue is a later copy, while the original is held in the civic museum. The Monte di Pietà palace facade bears the round stone Pietà that served as the institution's emblem, a Venetian lion partially chiselled by the Jacobins in 1797, and coats of arms of Venetian rectors who defended the Monte's independence from the Council of Nobles. Note too that some inscriptions were deliberately erased — not by revolutionaries but by the Venetians themselves in 1691, after a ruling against excessive glorification of mainland officials. The palace keeps its original iron-studded entrance door, and remnants of the fresco decoration that once covered its rooms survive inside. Against the corner with Via Valeriano, the Loggia dei Ghibellini — the loggia of Palazzo Costantini — shows a Gothic balustrade over three ancient columns with carved capitals.

Context and history

The Monte di Pietà arose from the preaching of the servite friar Elia da Brescia: construction began in 1501 and the palace was completed in 1531, a civic charity cast in durable stone. Beneath its portico, the attached church of the Beata Vergine della Salute grew from the Monte's chapel and preserves works by sculptor Andrea Brustolon and Leonardo Ridolfi (1684–1758). The Loggia dei Ghibellini is older still: documented by 1347 and restructured in 1471, it was absorbed around 1500 into the palace of the Costantini family, whose hospitality accommodated Emperor Maximilian during the War of the League of Cambrai in 1509-1511 — the closest Belluno came to hosting the imperial court. One capital shows the city's arms, another the Costantini's, a small diagram of how communal and family power interleaved on a single corner.