Introduction to Brescia, Italy

Located between two lakes and surrounded by vine-covered hills, the ancient settlement of BRESCIA is a wealthy town, famed for its arms industry. It has valuable Roman remains, Renaissance squares and a Medieval city centre juxtaposed with important twentieth-century architecture. Yet for all this, it's a scruffy and charmless town, lacking any of the elegance of other northern Italian cities. The gentle hills to the west are known as the Franciacorta and give their name to renowned wines made on the hillsides.

Brescia's centre is grouped around the four piazzas beyond the main Corso Palestro. Piazza del Mercato is a sprawling cobbled square of more interest to the stomach than the eye – there's a supermarket, and small shops selling local salamis and cheeses nestling under its dark porticoes. Piazza della Vittoria is quite different, a disquieting reminder of the Fascist regime embodied in the clinical austerity of Piacentrini's gleaming marble rectangles.

Alongside the monumental post office, Via 24 Maggio leads to Brescia's prettiest square, Piazza della Loggia, dating back to the fifteenth century, when the city invited Venice in to rule and protect it from Milan's power-hungry Viscontis. The Venetian influence is clearest in the fancily festooned Loggia, in which both Palladio and Titian had a hand, and in the Torre dell'Orologio, modelled on the campanile in Venice's Piazza San Marco. In the northeast corner is the Porta Bruciata, a defensive medieval tower-gate, which in 1974, as part of the Strategy of Tension, was the scene of a Fascist bomb attack during a trade union march, in which eight people were killed and over a hundred injured.

To the south of Porta Bruciata, a small side street leads to Piazza Paolo VI, one of the few squares in Italy to have two cathedrals – though, frankly, it would have been better off without the second, a heavy Mannerist monument that took over two hundred years to complete. The old twelfth-century cathedral, or Rotonda (April–Oct daily except Tues 9am–noon & 3–7pm; Nov–March Sat & Sun 10am–noon & 3–6pm), is quite a different matter, a simple circular building of local stone, whose fine proportions are sadly difficult to appreciate from the outside as it is sunk below the current level of the piazza. Inside, glass set into the transept pavement reveals the remains of Roman baths (a wall and geometrical mosaics) and the apse of an eighth-century basilica, which burned down in 1097. Most interesting is the fine red marble tomb of Berardo Maggi, a thirteenth-century Bishop of Brescia, opposite the entrance, decorated on one side with a full-length relief of the cleric, on the other by reliefs showing other ecclesiasts and dignitaries processing through a lively crowd of citizens to celebrate the peace Maggi had brought to the town's rival Guelph and Ghibelline factions.

Behind Piazza del Duomo, Via Mazzini leads to Via dei Musei – the decumanus maximus of the Roman town of Brixia, with Via Gallo the cardus. There's a theatre, but the most substantial monument is the Capitolino, a Roman temple built in 73 AD, now partly reconstructed with red brick. Behind the temple are three reconstructed celle, probably temples to the Capitoline trinity of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.

Further along Via dei Musei is the civic museum in the monastery complex of Santa Giulia (Tues–Sun: April–Sept 10am–8pm, Fri until 10pm; Oct–March 9.30am–5.30pm; €6). Inside are three churches: the oldest being San Salvatore, whose present structure dates back to the twelfth century but includes the remains of an original crypt built in 762 to house the relics of St Julia; Santa Maria in Solario, built in the twelfth century as a private chapel for the Benedictine nuns who lived at the abbey, is covered in frescoes painted mainly by the Renaissance artist Floriano Ferramola; and the late-sixteenth-century church of Santa Giulia with further frescoes by Ferramola. The museum is a collection of artefacts chronicling the city's history from the Bronze Age to the end of the twentieth century. The highlights are undoubtedly the Roman rooms containing bronze objects found by the Capitolium including the life-sized winged Victory and the beautifully preserved mosaic floors of the Roman domus. Other prize exhibits include an eighth-century crucifix presented to the convent by Desiderius, King of the Lombards – made of wood overlaid with silver and encrusted with over two hundred gems and cameos and a collection of priceless glassware.

Behind the museum, Via Piamarta climbs up the Cydnean Hill, the core of early Roman Brixia, mentioned by Catullus, though again the remains are scanty. There are a few fragments of a gate just before you reach the sixteenth-century church of San Pietro in Oliveto, so called because of the olive grove surrounding it, and the hill itself is crowned by the Castello (daily 8am–8pm; free) – a monument to Brescia's various overlords, begun in the fifteenth century by Luchino Visconti and added to by the Venetians, French and Austrians over the years. The resultant confusion of towers, ramparts, halls and courtyards makes a good place for an atmospheric picnic, and holds a complex of museums including Italy's largest museum of arms, the Museo del Risorgimento (Sun: June–Sept 3–6pm; Oct–May 2.30–5.30pm; free) and a model railway museum (Tues–Sun: June–Sept 10am–5pm; Oct–May 9.30am–1pm & 2.30–5pm; €3).

More appealing perhaps is Brescia's main art gallery, the Pinacoteca Tosio-Martinengo (Tues–Sun: June–Sept 10am–5pm; Oct–May 9.30am–1pm & 2.30–5pm; €3), which consists of a well laid-out collection mainly made up of the works of minor local artists, including a beautiful black Sant'Apollonia by Vincenzo Foppa. The rooms devoted to the "Nativity" and "Town and Province" are worth a look, as are those of the seventeenth-century realist Ceruti, who, unusually for his time, specialized in painting the poor.

Information by Rough Guides

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