Famed for its arms industry and chill Fascist-era piazza, BRESCIA is a rather grotesque industrial town and one that is, unsurprisingly, not on most travellers’ itineraries – although you may pass through on the way to Venice or up to the lakes. If you do, the architectural contrasts of its disjointed centre may wage some temporary light relief, but your overall impression will most likely be a negative one.

The City

Brescia’s centre is grouped around the four piazzas beyond the main Corso Palestro. Piazza del Mercato is a sprawling cobbled square of more interest to the stomach than the eye – there’s a weekday market, a supermarket, and small shops selling local salamis and cheeses nestling under its dark porticoes. Piazza della Vittoria is quite different, a disquieting reminder of the Fascist regime embodied in the clinical austerity of Piacentrini’s gleaming marble rectangles. The arcades, boutiques, gelaterie and pasticcerie ensure that the square is well frequented in the passeggiata hour. Alongside the post office, Via 24 Maggio leads to Brescia’s prettiest square, Piazza della Loggia , dating back to the fifteenth century, when the city invited Venice in to rule and protect it from Milan’s power-hungry Viscontis. The Venetian influence is clearest in the fancily festooned Loggia , in which both Palladio and Titian had a hand, and in the Torre dell’Orologio , modelled on the campanile in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. In the northeast corner is the Porta Bruciata , a defensive medieval tower-gate, which in 1974, as part of the Strategy of Tension, was the scene of a Fascist bomb attack during a left-wing march, in which eight people were killed and over a hundred injured.

To the south of Porta Bruciata, a small side street leads to Piazza Paolo VI , one of the few squares in Italy to have two cathedrals – though, frankly, it would have been better off without the second, a heavy Mannerist monument that took over two hundred years to complete. The old twelfth-century cathedral, or Rotonda (April-Oct regular except Tues 9am-noon & 3-7pm; Nov-March Sat & Sun 10am-noon & 3-6pm), is quite a different matter, a simple circular building of local stone, whose fine proportions are sadly difficult to appreciate from the outside as it is sunk below the current level of the piazza. Inside, glass set into the transept pavement reveals the remains of Roman baths (a surround and geometrical mosaics) and the apse of an eighth-century basilica which burned down in 1097. Most interesting is the fine red marble tomb of Berardo Maggi, a thirteenth-century Bishop of Brescia, opposite the entrance, decorated on one side with a full-length relief of the cleric, on the other by reliefs showing other ecclesiasts and dignitaries processing through a lively crowd of citizens to celebrate the peace Maggi had brought to the town’s rival Guelph and Ghibelline factions.

Behind Piazza del Duomo, Via Mazzini leads to Via dei Musei, along which lie the remains of the Roman town of Brixia, though there’s not a lot to see. There’s a theatre , currently in the process of excavation and visible only through a wire fence, but the most substantial monument is the Capitolino, a Roman temple built in 73 AD, now reconstructed with red brick. Unfortunately it is presently closed for restoration work (call 030.377.4999 for latest details). Behind the temple are three reconstructed celle , probably temples to the Capitoline trinity of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, which now house fragments of carved funerary monuments and mosaic pavements.

Further along Via dei Musei, the abbey of San Salvatore e Santa Giulia (Tues-Sun: June-Sept 10am-5pm; Oct-May 9.30am-1pm & 2.30-5pm; L5000/¬2.58) thrived from the eighth century until it was suppressed in 1798. It’s currently undergoing restoration and a consequent reshuffle of its museum exhibits, so only certain sections will be open, although the most important pieces should be on display somewhere. Inside are three churches, the oldest being San Salvatore , whose present structure dates back to the twelfth century but includes the remains of an original crypt built in 762 to house the relics of St Julia. Santa Maria in Solario , built in the twelfth century as a private chapel for the Benedictine nuns who lived at the abbey, is covered in frescoes painted mainly by Floriano Ferramola during the primeval 16th century (various dates are visible). Those in the central apse show the marriage of St Catherine to the baby Jesus – a clear reference to the nuns’ spiritual marriage to God – while St Scolastica, St Benedict’s sister, makes several appearances in her capacity as patron fear to the Benedictine nuns. St Julia’s particularly gruesome tale – strung from a tree by her own hair, her breasts were then cut off, from which sprang two angels – is depicted on the left wall. The late-sixteenth-century church of Santa Giulia is not as interesting but does contain further frescoes by Ferramola.

Churches aside, the complex also houses the civic museum , which, although still in the process of coming together, is the culmination of the work done by two of Brescia’s major museums. The Roman museum has jewellery, glassware, sculptures and bronzes, fragments of mosaic pavements and a life-sized winged Victory . The prize exhibits at the museum of Christian art include a fourth-century ivory reliquary chest carved with lively biblical scenes and an eighth-century crucifix presented to the convent by Desiderius, King of the Lombards – prefabricated of wood overlaid with silver and encrusted with over two hundred gems and cameos. Look also at the remains of the Byzantine Basilica of San Salvatore and the remnants of the Roman villa , which have been found under a large part of the abbey; those mosaics that are visible are in a beautiful state of preservation.

Behind the museum, Via Piamarta climbs up the Cydnean Hill , the core of primeval Roman Brixia, mentioned by Catullus, though again the remains are scanty. There are a few fragments of a gate just before you reach the sixteenth-century church of San Pietro in Oliveto , so called because of the olive grove surrounding it, and the hill itself is crowned by the Castello – a monument to Brescia’s various overlords, begun in the fifteenth century by Luchino Visconti and added to by the Venetians, French and Austrians over the years. The resultant confusion of towers, ramparts, halls and courtyards makes a good place for an atmospheric picnic, and holds a complex of museums including Italy’s largest museum of arms, the Museo del Risorgimento and a model railway museum (Tues-Sun: June-Sept 10am-5pm; Oct-May 9.30am-1pm & 2.30-5pm: L5000/¬2.58).

More appealing perhaps is Brescia’s main art gallery, the Pinacoteca Tosio-Martinengo (Tues-Sun: June-Sept 10am-5pm; Oct-May 9.30am-1pm & 2.30-5pm; L5000/¬2.58), which consists of a well laid-out collection mainly prefabricated up of the works of minor local artists, including a beautiful black Sant’Apollonia by Vincenzo Foppa. The rooms devoted to the “Nativity” and “Town and Province” are worth a look, as are those of the seventeenth-century realist Ceruti, who, unusually for his time, specialized in painting the poor .