Piazza delle Erbe and the Salone: Padua's Market Squares

The two squares flanking the great hall — herbs and greens on one side, fruit on the other — have been the city's provisioning point for eight centuries. A market has run here since 1219, the year the palace of justice above was completed, and the fifteenth-century arcades formalised what had been an open-air trade: long vaulted passages where the stalls moved off the wet ground and under cover, and where the market still gathers on weekday mornings today. The rhythm is fixed and worth planning around: stalls trade from roughly 7:30 to 13:00, Monday to Saturday, with the vegetable and fruit pitches spreading across both squares and into the lanes; by early afternoon the pavements are hosed and quiet, and from late afternoon the arcades belong to the aperitivo crowd.

Two details tie the square to its medieval justice system. At the corner of the palace, the Volto della Corda — the arch of the rope — is the vaulted passage through which insolvent debtors were once marched to face their creditors, its name recalling the rope they were bound with. And the market's law enforcement extended to shame: the pietra del vituperio, the stone of shame, still sits inside the hall above, where bankrupts were made to sit three times in public humiliation. The stalls themselves sell the standard Veneto morning range — vegetables, fruit, flowers, cheese and cured meats, household goods spilling into the side lanes — and the permanent food shops ringing Piazza delle Frutti keep trading all day when the stalls have gone.

• 1219: the market's documented beginnings, the same year the palace above was completed.
• 15th century: the arcades are built against the palace walls — the market moves under cover.
• Volto della Corda: the passage arch linked to debtors marched to justice.
• Pietra del vituperio: the stone of shame inside the hall, seat of public humiliation for bankrupts.
• Today: market Mon-Sat 7:30-13:00; Piazza delle Frutti's food shops trade all day.

The building Paduans call il Ragione or il Salone was raised as the seat of the city's courts and assemblies, complete in 1219 after roughly half a century of work — and immediately enormous. The great hall on the upper floor runs about 81.5 metres long and 27 metres wide under a roof rising 24 metres, which places it among the largest unsupported medieval halls in Europe. Its profile is the work of the friar Giovanni degli Eremitani, who in 1306 replaced the original three roofs with a single spanning roof shaped like an inverted ship's hull — the form that gives the palace its distinctive keel silhouette from the squares below.

The frescoes are the reason to pay the €8.00. Giotto, at work in the city for the chapel commission on the northern edge, is credited with an original astrological cycle here; it burned with the roof fire of 1420, and between 1425 and 1440 Nicola Miretto and Stefano da Ferrara repainted the walls with the cycle you see today — several hundred scenes arranged in concentric bands that together function as a gigantic astrological almanac, month by month, sign by sign, with the labours and pleasures of each season. Three hundred-odd panels of calendars and zodiac make it one of the largest surviving fresco programmes of its kind anywhere. Two curiosities anchor the visit: the great wooden horse built in 1466 and modelled on Donatello's Gattamelata then standing outside the basilica, and the stone of shame by the entrance steps. The hall is one open room — fifteen minutes reads it, forty enjoys it.

The Salone at a glance

Everything below is inside a single ticket and a single room — the sequence works in any order, but the fresco bands reward starting at the entrance end and reading month by month.