Vicenza

• 1. Introduction

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  Vicenza sits at the northern base of Monte Berico, straddling the River Bacchiglione in the Veneto region of northeastern Italy. Roughly 60 kilometers west of Venice and 200 kilometers east of Milan, it is a city that wears its contradictions lightly: a place that once fed itself on cat meat during wartime famine, yet today produces about one fifth of all the gold and jewelry made in Italy. A city whose streets were the most bombed in the Veneto during World War II, yet whose Renaissance squares survive as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And a city whose name traces back to a Latin root meaning 'victorious', a label it has had to earn, and re-earn, over two thousand years of invasion, occupation, and reinvention. What made Vicenza the city it is? Who shaped its skyline? How did a modest Roman way-station on the road from Milan to Aquileia become one of Italy's wealthiest industrial centres, a place where a co-inventor of the microprocessor was born and where fashion houses like Diesel and Bottega Veneta took root? Those are the questions ahead.

• 2. Roman Roots

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  In 157 BC, the settlement known as Vicetia or Vincentia received formal recognition as a Roman center, its very name declaring 'victorious.' The city had been occupied before Rome arrived: the Italic Euganei tribe settled the area first, followed by the Paleo-Veneti in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. The Paleo-Veneti were unusual among the peoples Rome encountered in northern Italy. Their culture aligned more closely with Etruscan and Greek values than with the Celtic traditions of neighboring tribes, which made them natural allies for Rome in its long campaign against Celtic groups across the northwest.

  Roman citizenship arrived in 49 BC, when the citizens of Vicetia were enrolled in the Roman tribe Romilia. The city earned a reputation for wool, brickworks, marble quarrying, and agriculture, and it served as a staging post on the key road connecting Mediolanum (the city we now call Milan) to Aquileia near Tergeste, the city that would become Trieste. Despite that logistical position, Vicetia never quite matched the clout of its neighbor Patavium, the city we know today as Padua.

  Three bridges across the Bacchiglione and Retrone rivers survive from Roman construction, and isolated arches of a Roman aqueduct still stand outside the Porta Santa Croce. These fragments are almost all that remains. When the Western Roman Empire began to fracture, the area suffered in sequence from Heruls, Vandals, Visigoths under Alaric, and finally the Huns. The city recovered under the Ostrogoths after their conquest in 489 AD, then passed to the Byzantine Empire, then became first a Lombard city and then a Frankish one. Benedictine monasteries began appearing in the Vicenza area from the 6th century onward, quietly staking a different kind of claim on the land.

• 3. Medieval Turbulence

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  Magyar raiders destroyed Vicenza in 899, the first of several episodes that would define the city's medieval character: recurring devastation followed by stubborn reconstruction. In 1001, Emperor Otto III transferred authority over the city to its bishop, creating the opening for a communal government to develop. That commune soon outgrew episcopal tutelage and became an active player in the politics of northern Italy.

  Vicenza's podesta, Ezzelino II il Balbo, captained the Lombard League (1164-1167) against Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, compelling the neighboring cities of Padua and Treviso to join the alliance. The league succeeded, but peace only revived the old quarrels between Vicenza and its rivals, compounded by internal factional fighting between the Ghibelline Vivaresi and the Guelph Maltraversi.

  Ezzelino III, a tyrant from Bassano, drove the Guelphs out of the city and had his own brother Alberico elected podesta in 1230. The commune joined the Second Lombard League against Emperor Frederick II, who sacked the city in 1237 before absorbing it into Ezzelino's territory. After Ezzelino's death, Vicenza restored its oligarchic council structure: a grand council of four hundred members and a smaller council of forty, modeled loosely on Venetian governance.

  The city then placed itself under Padua's protection to preserve its republican freedoms, but Padua's guardianship quickly turned into outright domination. To escape Paduan control, Vicenza submitted to the Scaligeri lords of Verona in 1311. The Scaligeri fortified the city against threats from the Visconti of Milan. In 1404, the Republic of Venice absorbed Vicenza, and the city's subsequent history became largely an extension of Venice's own story. In 1496, the podesta Antonio Bernardo expelled the Jews from Vicenza, an act that placed the city among many Italian communities that participated in the late-medieval expulsions sweeping the peninsula.

• 4. Palladio's City

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  Andrea Palladio transformed Vicenza in the 16th century, leaving behind twenty-three buildings that would eventually anchor the city's identity on the world stage. Before his arrival, the city was considered, by some accounts, the most aesthetically lacking in the Veneto. Palladio reversed that judgment so thoroughly that UNESCO inscribed 'Vicenza, City of Palladio' on its World Heritage list in 1994. Two years later, in 1996, the designation expanded to cover the Palladian villas outside the city core and was renamed 'City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto.'

  The Basilica Palladiana stands at the center of the Piazza dei Signori, and Palladio himself reportedly said it might stand comparison with any similar work of antiquity. The Teatro Olimpico was designed for the Accademia Olimpica and construction began in 1580, the year Palladio died. The wooden stage scenery inside was completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi. Villa Almerico Capra, better known as 'La Rotonda,' sits just outside the city center. The Palazzo Chiericati now houses the city's pinacotheca, while the Palazzo Barbaran da Porto holds the Museo Palladio.

  Palladio's reach extended even to religious architecture. Santa Maria Nova, a late 16th-century church, is the only religious building both designed and built by Palladio in Vicenza itself, aside from the Valmarana chapel and limited work on the cathedral. The cathedral of Santa Maria Annunciata dates from early in the 11th century and its dome and north side door bear Palladio's hand.

  The Napoleonic period brought loss as well as transformation. After the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, Vicenza became a hereditary nominal duchy for the French general Caulaincourt. Among the casualties of that occupation was the destruction of a prized silver model of the city, known as the Jewel of Vicenza, an irreplaceable artifact of civic pride.

• 5. Revolution and War

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  Vicenza passed to the Austrian Empire in 1814, but the city did not absorb the change quietly. In 1848, the population rose against Austrian rule with a violence surpassed in Italy only by Milan and Brescia. That uprising earned the city the highest Italian award for military valor. Annexation to the unified Kingdom of Italy followed after the Third Italian War of Independence.

  The 20th century brought destruction on a scale that dwarfed anything the Magyars or Ezzelino had inflicted. Vicenza's territory was a major combat zone during World War I, particularly on the Asiago plateau. During World War II, the city became a focal center of Italian resistance, and Allied bombing left it the most damaged city in the entire Veneto. Civil casualties exceeded 2,000 people, and many of the city's monuments were struck.

  The postwar years brought economic depression first, then an unexpected transformation. During the 1960s, the whole central part of the Veneto witnessed rapid economic growth driven by small and medium family businesses producing a vast array of goods, a phenomenon that became known as the 'miracolo del nord-est,' or 'miracle of the northeast.' Vicenza rode that wave hard. Industrial areas expanded rapidly around the city. Urbanization grew massively and in disorganized fashion, and employment of foreign immigrants increased.

  One consequence of Vicenza's wartime suffering survived in culinary memory. The city's residents carry the nickname mangiagatti, meaning 'cat eaters,' a reference to the purported practice of eating cats during famines, including the deprivations of World War II. Vicentines have worn the label with a kind of rueful humor, folding it into a culinary identity that otherwise centers on polenta, baccala, and the Asiago plateau's namesake cheese.

• 6. Industry and Gold

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  Vicenza is Italy's third-largest industrial center by export value, a ranking that surprises visitors who associate the Veneto primarily with art and tourism. The city's wealth rests on several pillars: textiles, steel, and above all, gold and jewelry. About one fifth of all gold and jewelry manufactured in Italy comes from Vicenza. The Gold Exposition, which takes place twice yearly in January and September, draws buyers and sellers from around the world.

  Clothing firms with international recognition include Diesel, Marzotto, Bottega Veneta, and Pal Zileri, all with roots in the Vicenza area. The bicycle component manufacturer Campagnolo, founded by Gentullio 'Tullio' Campagnolo, whose name appears on the city's list of notable people, is headquartered here, as is Dainese, the protective wear manufacturer for sports.

  The engineering and computing sector carries a particular legacy. Federico Faggin, co-inventor of the microprocessor, was born in Vicenza. His origin in a city better known for Renaissance architecture and gold markets captures something essential about the place: it has always supported multiple parallel economies, each largely invisible to observers focused on the one in front of them.

  Vicenza railway station, opened in 1846 as part of the Milan-Venice railway, connected the city to two branch lines running to Schio and Treviso, giving local industries early access to regional markets. The surrounding countryside contributes wine, wheat, corn, and olive oil, while mineral springs at Recoaro are among the most famous in the area. Campagnolo's bicycle components, still made in the city that produced the microprocessor's co-inventor, continue to supply professional cycling teams worldwide.

• 7. People and Diaspora

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  Antonio Pigafetta, born in Vicenza, sailed with Ferdinand Magellan on the voyage that became the first circumnavigation of the globe, and his written account of that journey remains one of the primary sources for the expedition. Romeo Menti, a Vicentine footballer who played for the legendary Grande Torino squad, died in the Superga air disaster. Roberto Baggio, one of Italy's most celebrated footballers, also comes from the city.

  From 1876 to 1976, more than one million people emigrated from the province of Vicenza, driven out by poverty, war, and disease. Today, more than three million people of Vicentino descent live around the world, with the largest concentrations in Brazil, the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Belgium, and Switzerland. The city has since inverted that flow: it now receives more immigrants than it sends out.

  The largest single immigrant group in Vicenza today comes from the United States, numbering around 9,000, a figure partly explained by the presence of the US Army post Caserma Ederle, also known as Camp Ederle. In 1965, that base became the headquarters of the Southern European Task Force, which includes the 173d Airborne Brigade. In January 2006, the European Gendarmerie Force was inaugurated in the city.

  The city is twinned with Annecy in France since 1995, Pforzheim in Germany since 1991, Wuxi in China since 2006, and Cleveland, Ohio since 2009. Pigafetta's house, Casa Pigafetta, built in 1440, still stands in the city. It is a concrete reminder that Vicenza's most consequential exports have not always been gold or bicycles or microprocessors, but sometimes the people who sailed off the edge of the known world and came back with the story.