On your right, look for a tall square brick tower rising from the palace, marked by a small stone clock face and a crown of forked battlements at the top.
This is Treviso’s civic tower... forty-eight meters of medieval authority with a slightly rewritten ending. Town leaders raised it in twelve eighteen, during the communal age, as part of the Palazzo dei Trecento complex. Then, between twelve sixty-five and twelve sixty-eight, builders absorbed it into the westward expansion of the Palazzo del Podestà. Even in the Middle Ages, nobody could resist a renovation. Over time, they gave it a grand clock facing the square and a lantern above. In eighteen seventy-seven, engineer Antonio Monterumici rebuilt the ruined top, pushed it a little higher, and finished it with neo-Romanesque Ghibelline merlons... those swallowtail battlements that look ready for an argument. Inside hangs the civic bell, cast by De Poli in Vittorio Veneto, weighing about two thousand seven hundred kilograms and struck by hammer every hour. At twelve thirty on the seventh of April, nineteen forty-four, a siren up there warned of the American bombing. It’s a tower that carries both civic pride and a hard memory. When you’re ready, continue toward Calmaggiore; if access is available, visiting hours are generally nine to seven every day.
