Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II

Formerly Piazza dei Signori, Rovigo's main square sets a Venetian column with the lion of St Mark against the notaries' medieval loggia, the civic tower, the Accademia dei Concordi and a king on horseback inaugurated in 1881, three years after the city repaved the square in 1878 and gave it its present royal name.

Why it matters

Rovigo's principal square is the city drawn in one plan. The municipal portal records that it was once called Piazza dei Signori, the lords' square, and its monuments still argue out the city's political history: a column raised under Venice, a lion smashed by French soldiers, a king commissioned by the notables of 1878. Around it stand the buildings that made Rovigo govern itself — the town hall loggia where notaries worked before 1286, the civic tower of Venetian pedigree, and the palace of an academy founded in 1580 whose library runs to hundreds of thousands of volumes.

What to notice

The column with the lion of St Mark rises on the southern side. The portal dates its erection to 1508, a stone assertion of Venetian dominion; French troops destroyed the lion in 1797, and the sculpture now on top was set back in place in 1881, when the monument to King Vittorio Emanuele II was inaugurated. The current bronze lion is credited to Augusto Sanavio. The arcaded Loggia dei Nodari on the north side has housed the great bell of the castle keep since 1488. Nearby stand the civic tower, the neoclassical palace of the Accademia dei Concordi and the unfinished Renaissance mass of Palazzo Roverella, which closes one flank and hosts international exhibitions.

Context and history

The square grew as the civic centre of a town that passed from the Este orbit to long subjection to Venice. Under the name Piazza dei Signori it collected the institutions of government: the notaries' loggia, seat of today's municipality, whose guild had worked on this spot since before 1286, and, from the early sixteenth century, the Venetian column. The Enciclopedia-style account of the city adds that the current lion replaced the one toppled by the French in 1797.

The square's present identity was fixed in the new kingdom of Italy. When Vittorio Emanuele II died in January 1878, the leading citizens commissioned a marble statue in his memory; the whole paving of the square was redone for the work, and the space took the king's name. The monument's inauguration in 1881 doubled as the lion's restoration to the column. The learned side of the square has its own founding story: Count Gaspare Campo established the Accademia dei Concordi in 1580, and in 1814 the academy gained a dignified palace here, completed to Sante Baseggio's designs. With a library of some 300,000 items and a pinacoteca hanging works by Bellini, Tiepolo, Palma il Vecchio and Piazzetta, it gives the square an intellectual address to set beside its ceremonial role.