Mura scaligere e Cammino di Ronda

Marostica's walls run nearly two kilometres from hilltop castle to valley floor, a battlemented fourteenth-century circuit studded with twenty-four small towers and pierced by four gates. Since 2014 the eastern parapet has included a restored walkway above the roofs.

Why it matters

Work on the circuit began on 1 March 1372 under Cansignorio della Scala, and the Venetian writer Marin Sanudo recorded that the whole undertaking took three years and was finished by 1375. What resulted was not a mere curtain but the shell of a planned walled town: merlons, patrol walkways, twenty-four towers, fortified gates with outworks, a moat and drawbridges. The purpose was strategic. Marostica stood as a Scaliger outpost on the border with Bassano, then held by the Carraresi, lords of Padua, and the walls made the border explicit in stone. They are among the most complete small-town wall systems in the Veneto. The operator calls the eastern walkway the most suggestive medieval street of the territory, where the defences remain legible from within and at their original height.

What to notice

The walls connect the Castello Superiore on the hill with the Castello Inferiore in the plain, illustrating the defensive grammar of the fourteenth century. Three gates — the Vicentina, Bassanese and Breganzina — face south, east and west; each is cut into a tower block and protected by a chambered outwork called a rivellino. A fourth, Porta di Tramontana, lies to the north along the eastern stretch. The eastern Cammino di Ronda is between eight and twelve metres above ground and about seventy centimetres wide. The gardens preserve the line of the old moat, whose wet ditch also explains the drawbridges recorded at the gates.

Context and history

The circuit belongs to the last great phase of Scaliger building, ordered by Cansignorio, whose signoria ran from 1359 to 1375, and it binds the two castles into a single defensive organism: the hilltop fortress watching over the valley, the wall-castle anchoring the plain, the masonry ribbon joining them. With drawbridges at the gates and a wet ditch, the enceinte turned a borgo that had already suffered Paduan assaults into a rational walled city. Under Venice the walls lost their military reason and slowly became a picturesque frame; houses leaned against them and gates became street names. The modern chapter began in 2014, when restoration of the eastern walkway added a new layer to the town's medieval fabric.