Palazzo dei Trecento

The Palazzo dei Trecento in Treviso, Italy, is a medieval communal palace built by the city’s commune in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Erected during the period when Italian towns were organising municipal government, the building dates to the turn of the 1200s and became one of Treviso’s principal public structures, facing the main civic square and hosting the city’s chief assemblies. Its long use as the meeting place for government bodies and courts made it central to urban administration and justice.

Evidence from early documents and later construction records shows the palace developed over several decades. An entry from 1207 names a stone civic building corresponding to the eastern wing, and the main assembly house is recorded around 1213 as a new home for the commune’s institutions. Other documentation links a building phase that began near 1185 with a later enlargement completed in 1268, when an adjoining structure was added to serve as a prison. From its earliest decades the complex served multiple public functions, including the court of the consuls, public town meetings, and the office of the podestà, the chief magistrate. The larger council that met there was the Maggior Consiglio, a body composed of three hundred members.

Changes continued through the early modern era. By the middle of the sixteenth century numerous shops had been established around and beneath the palace arcade; in 1546 forty-four such shops were recorded beneath the ground-floor arcade, each numbered and let by the commune on five-year leases. In 1552 the ground-level arcade was opened out into wide semicircular arches, and one of the two external ramps that once led to the upper hall was removed. During the nineteenth century further alterations occurred: in 1810 the external staircase on the square side and the remaining east ramp were taken down.

Under Austrian administration the great hall was converted to a notarial archive and was partitioned into smaller rooms with shelving; at that time the original triple-window openings were replaced with plain rectangular windows. At the start of the twentieth century a restoration programme removed exterior plaster, reinstated the triple windows, cleared the hall of archive fittings, and added battlements in a Ghibelline form; in the following years an external staircase providing access to the upper hall on the east side was rebuilt. In 1944 bombing caused heavy damage to the palace. Plans at the time considered complete demolition, but the surviving walls were preserved and collapsed sections, the roof, and battlements were reconstructed under the direction of the superintendent Ferdinando Forlati. The rebuilt battlements took a Guelph form, and a recessed course of bricks now marks the junction between original masonry and later reconstruction. Today the building serves as the seat of Treviso’s municipal council and is used for exhibitions.