The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

Treviso today is a brisk commercial centre and the capital of a province that
extends to the north almost as far as Belluno. As with every settlement in the
area, it used to be under Venetian control, but it was an important town long
before its assimilation by Venice in 1389. As early as the eighth century it was
minting its own coinage, and by the end of the thirteenth century, when it
was ruled by the Da Camino family, Treviso was renowned as a refuge for
artists and poets, and a model of good government. (Dante, in the Purgatorio,
praises Gherardo da Camino as a man “left from a vanished race in reproof to
these unruly times”.) Plenty of evidence of the town’s early stature survives in
the form of Gothic churches, public buildings and, most dramatically of all,
the paintings of Tomaso da Modena (1325–79), the dominant artist in northern
Italy in the years immediately after Giotto’s death. The general townscape
within Treviso’s sixteenth-century walls is often appealing too. A lack of local
the northern veneto
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