Piazza delle Erbe (or simply Piazza Erbe) is one of the main squares of Mantua. Began to take shape when the town hall, near the end of the twelfth century, began to expand beyond the Voltone of St. Peter, from the ancient Roman city that insisted in places then built the current Piazza Sordello. A large yard on the east side of the Monastery of St. Andrew, was intended to ensure that cattle market is held the cattle market. Transferred it in place more peripheral, the space behind the street of St. Andrew, now Via Broletto, where it already had been built shops leased to merchants, was divided in two by the Palazzo del Podesta (also called Palazzo del Broletto) and transformed in the administrative heart of the City. On the eastern side of the part that will become the Piazza delle Erbe, arose the Palazzo della Ragione. On the square being forged, already faced the Rotunda of San Lorenzo, in the Romanesque style, built by Matilda of Canossa, which in its circular structure reminiscent of the Holy Sepulchre, in this exalting its subsidiary to the Precious Blood of Christ and preserved venerated in the nearby Basilica of St. Andrew. With the domain before Bonacolsi and Gonzaga later, the administrative center of political power and moves on costruenda new St. Peter's Square (Piazza Sordello now). The medieval buildings of Piazza Erbe suffered over the centuries alterations and renovations. The sequence of houses that housed the city merchants, were exquisitely decorated with arcades of late Gothic and Renaissance. In 1455 was built the house of the merchant Giovan Boniforte from Concorezzo, individually decorated with terracotta taste of the late Gothic and Venetian, recognizable especially in trine of the windows. The House Boniforte, dominated by the fourteenth-century Torre del Salaro, confirms the coexistence of different architectures. To characterize the square as the Renaissance, was Luca Fancelli, the Florentine architect who worked in the building of the Basilica of St. Andrew on a project of his teacher Leon Battista Alberti. Fancelli intervened on the Palazzo del Podesta, remade the arcades in front of the Palazzo della Ragione and designed the Clock Tower for which he entrusted to Bartolomeo Manfredi, expert in astrology, the construction of the astronomical clock. The earthquake of May 29, 2012 has created many problems to the monuments of the square, in particular at the Palazzo della Ragione and, above the house of the merchant, the Tower of Salaro, crossed by a long vertical crack on the side of the building, but worsened preexisting with the earthquake.

свернуть