Marostica

Marostica sits at the foot of the Asolan hills, forty-five kilometers northwest of Padova. Cangrande della Scala took the town in 1311, building his lower fortress on the plain and a second stronghold on the hill above it, then joining the two with a wall long enough to carry two dozen towers and four gates between them. The arrangement is unusual: most walled towns fortify a single point, but here the defense runs uphill, turning the slope itself into the connecting structure between plain and ridge.

The upper stronghold did not survive the artillery of the War of the League of Cambrai in 1510 and has stood as a ruin since, while the lower one remained inhabited and working, which is why the town's public life, its square, its church, its chess board, still gathers at the base of the hill rather than at its summit. The cherries grown on the slopes to the north, since given IGP status, are the one product of the surrounding land that made it into the local kitchen as the crostata. What the town amounts to is a fortification that never stopped being a town: the walls did not seal Marostica off from its hillside, they organized it, and the square where the chess is played twice a decade sits exactly where the two castles' lines of sight once met.