Palmanova: a town built as a nine-pointed star

Palmanova was founded by the Republic of Venice in 1593¹ as a fortress town in the shape of a nine-pointed star, and it is the only town of its kind still intact in that form, inside three concentric rings of fortifications, with a place on the UNESCO list since July 9, 2017.

Nine of everything, in three rings

The town sits inside three concentric rings of defences. The two Venetian rings carry nine bastions and nine ravelins, and a third ring of nine lunettes was added under Napoleon in the early 19th century.

The number nine repeats from the outer ditch inwards, and the whole plan is symmetrical around the centre. It's the kind of geometry you normally see on a Renaissance treatise page, built at full scale in the Friulian plain.

At the middle is the main square, and it is hexagonal. A six-sided square inside a nine-pointed town is the first thing that tells you the design was worked out on paper, by people thinking about lines of fire rather than about markets.

Designed for 20,000 people

The plan provided for 20,000¹ inhabitants on 70 hectares. That was the target of the Venetian planners, a fortress town sized for a population it was expected to grow into.

The fortified circuit can be walked for more than 4 km today. It is the best way to understand the place: from the walls the star becomes visible in a way it never does from the streets inside.

Palmanova has also been a national monument since 1960, decades before the UNESCO listing.

On the list with Bergamo and Peschiera

Since July 9, 2017 Palmanova has been part of the UNESCO site of the Venetian works of defence between the 16th and 17th centuries, a serial listing whose Italian components are Bergamo, Peschiera del Garda and Palmanova.

That makes it one of Italy's transregional sites, touching three regions: Lombardy, Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Each component shows a different answer to the same problem, how to defend a state's frontier with earth, stone and angles.

Palmanova is the component where the fortress and the town are one object, since the whole town was founded inside its defences in 1593¹.

One of five sites in Friuli-Venezia Giulia

Friuli-Venezia Giulia has 5 World Heritage sites in 2026, and four of them are shared with other regions. Alongside the defence works, the region has a share of the Dolomites, of the Longobard sites and of the prehistoric pile dwellings.

Only Aquileia, the archaeological area and patriarchal basilica listed in 1998, lies wholly inside the region. With four of its five sites shared, the region's list is mostly made of pieces of larger ones, and Palmanova is one of those pieces.

Another ideal city, a different purpose

Sabbioneta, in Lombardy, was inscribed with Mantova in 2008 under criteria (ii) and (iii), and the listing describes it as an ideal city founded from scratch by the Gonzaga. Together the two sites cover a core zone of 235⁴ hectares, with a buffer zone of 2,330⁴ around them.

The comparison is useful. The Gonzaga built an ideal city around a court. Venice built one around a defence line. Both started from a blank plan in the same century, and the purpose shows in every street width and every angle.

How to see it

The walls give you more than 4 km of walkable circuit, so start there, not in the square. Walk a stretch of the circuit first, then come in along one of the radial streets to the hexagonal centre, and the plan will make sense in the order it was designed.

The visiting details are at Palmanova, and the region at Friuli-Venezia Giulia. For a very different planned settlement on the list, built by an employer rather than a state, see a company town on the UNESCO list.

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