Look for a long, uneven stone piazza edged by pale masonry facades, with the cathedral’s broad front and the baptistery tucked beside it.
This elongated, asymmetric square is Treviso’s religious heart, the counterweight to Piazza dei Signori, where politics held court. Around you stand the cathedral, San Giovanni Battista - now the baptistery, the church used for baptisms - the episcopio, the bishop’s residence, and, in the recess between cathedral and baptistery, the Scuola del Santissimo Sacramento. Across from the cathedral is the former courthouse, later municipal offices until the two thousands. Treviso reuses its buildings. Earlier, this side held Ezzelino the Third da Romano’s palace, until citizens burned it in twelve sixty, then a grain warehouse turned wood store, which gave the square its old names: Piazza delle Biade and Piazza delle Legne. In nineteen thirty-five, workers demolished houses here during the restoration of San Giovanni Battista; then Anglo-American bombing in nineteen forty-four damaged the bishop’s palace and destroyed Casa Barisan, the Casa Rossa frescoed by Giovanni Matteo da Treviso in fifteen oh three. Fifteenth-century Casa Dal Corno still survives. This square wears history with little vanity. When you’re ready, continue toward the cathedral itself.
