Mantua / Mantova

A twenty-minute achievement from the centre of Mantua, at the end of the long spine of Via Principe Amedeo and Via Acerbi, the Palazzo Te is the later of the city’s two Gonzaga palaces, and equally compelling in its way; and you can take in a few of Mantua’s more minor attractions on the way there. The first thing to look at on the way is Giulio Romano’s Fish Market , to the left off Piazza Martiri Belfiori, a short covered bridge over the river, which is still used as a market building. Following Via Principe Amedeo south, the Casa di Giulio Romano , off to the right at Via Poma 18, overshadowed by the monster-studded Palazzo di Giustizia, was also designed by Romano - like much of his Mantuan work, it was meant to impress the sophisticated, who would have found the licence taken with the Classical rules of structure witty and amusing. A five-minute achievement away on busy Via Giovanni Acerbi, the more austere brick Casa del Mantegna was also designed by the artist, both as a home and private museum, and is now used as a contemporary art-space and conference centre (during exhibitions regular 10am-12.30pm & 3-6pm). Across the road, the church of San Sebastiano (Tues-Sun 10am-12.30pm & 4-6pm; L3000/¬1.55) was the work of Alberti, and is famous as the first Renaissance church to be built on a central Greek cross plan, described as “curiously pagan” by Nicholas Pevsner. Lodovico II’s son was less polite: “I could not understand whether it was meant to turn out as a church, a mosque or a synagogue.” Its days as a consecrated building are over and it now contains commemorative plaques forming a monument to the fallen Mantuan soldiers of World War II.

At the end of Via Giovanni Acerbi, crossways Viale Te, the Palazzo Te (Mon 1-6pm, Tues-Sun 9am-6pm; L12,000/¬6.20) was designed for playboy Federico Gonzaga and his mistress, Isabella Boschetta, by Giulio Romano; it’s the artist/architect’s greatest work and a renowned Renaissance pleasure dome. When the palace was built, Te - or Tejeto, as it used to be known - was an island connected to the mainland by bridge, an saint location for an amorous retreat away from Federico’s wife and the restrictions of life in the Palazzo Ducale. Built around a square courtyard originally occupied by a labyrinth, these days it houses modest but appealing collections of Egyptian artefacts and modern art, although the main reason for visiting is to see Giulio’s amazing decorative scheme.

A tour of the palace is like a voyage around Giulio’s imagination, a sumptuous world where very little is what it seems. In the Camera del Sole e delle Luna , the sun and the moon are represented by a pair of horse-drawn chariots viewed from below, giving a fine array of bottoms on the ceiling; in the Sala dei Cavalli , dedicated to the prime specimens from the Gonzaga stud-farm (which was also on the island), portraits of horses stand before an illusionistic background in which simulated marble, imitation pilasters and mock reliefs surround views of painted landscapes through nonexistent windows. The function of the Sala di Psiche , further on, is undocumented, but the sultry frescoes, and the closeness to Federico’s private quarters, might give a few clues, the ceiling paintings telling the story of Cupid and Psyche with some more dizzying “sotto in su” (from the bottom up) works by Giulio, among others clumsily executed by his pupils. On the walls, too, are spirited pieces, covered with orgiastic wedding-feast scenes, at which drunk and languishing gods in various states of undress are attended by a menagerie of real and mythical beasts. Don’t miss the severely incontinent river-god in the background, included either as a punning reference to Giulio’s second name, Pippi (The Pisser), or as encouragement to Federico who, according to his doctors, suffered from the “obstinate retention of urine”. Other scenes show Mars and Venus having a bath, Olympia about to be raped by a half-serpentine Jupiter and Pasiphae disguising herself as a cow in order to seduce a bull - all watched over by the giant Polyphemus, perched above the fireplace, clutching the pan-pipes with which he sang of his love for Galatea before murdering her lover.

Polyphemus and his fellow giants are revenged in the extraordinary Sala dei Giganti beyond - “the most fantastic and frightening creation of the whole Renaissance”, according to the critic Frederick Hartt - showing the destruction of the giants by the gods. As if at some kind of advanced disaster movie, the destruction appears to be all around: cracking pillars, toppling brickwork, and screaming giants, mangled and crushed by great chunks of architecture, appearing to crash down into the room. Stamp your feet and you’ll discover another parallel to twentieth-century cinema - the sound-effects that Giulio created by making the room into an reflexion chamber.

The Palazzo del Capitano and Magna Domus form the core of the Palazzo Ducale , an enormous complex that was once the largest palace in Europe (Tues-Sun 8.45am-7.15pm; June-Sept Sat until 11pm; L12,000/¬6.20). At its height it covered 34,000 square metres, had a population of over a thousand, and when it was sacked by the Habsburgs in 1630 eighty carriages were needed to carry the two thousand works of art contained in its five hundred rooms. Only a proportion of these rooms are open to visitors, and to see them you have to take a guided tour that takes you through to the Sala dei Specchi and then allows you to wander freely through the grounds and the Castello di San Giorgio. The tours are conducted in Italian only and are evenhandedly indiscriminate; save your energy for the rooms that deserve it. At the time of Luigi’s coup of 1328, the Gonzagas were a family of wealthy local peasants, living outside the city on vast estates with an army of retainers. On seizing power Luigi immediately nominated himself Captain of the People - an event pictured in one of the first paintings you’ll see on your tour - and the role quickly became a hereditary one, eventually growing in grandeur to that of marquis. During this time the Gonzagas did their best to make Mantua into a city which was a suitable reflection of their increasing influence, commissioning sought-after Renaissance artists like Mantegna to depict them in their finery. Lodovico II’s grandson, Francesco II, further swelled the Gonzagan coffers by hiring himself out as a mercenary for various other Italian city-states - money his wife, Isabella d’Este, spent amassing a prestigious collection of paintings, sculpture and objets d’art. Under Isabella’s son, Federico II, Gonzaga fortunes reached their height; his marriage to the heiress of the duchy of Monferrato procured a ducal title for the family, while he continued the policy of self-glorification by commissioning an out-of-town villa for himself and his mistress. Federico’s descendants were for the most part less colourful characters, one notable exception being Vincenzo I, whose debauchery and corruption provided the inspiration for Verdi’s licentious duke in Rigoletto . After Vincenzo’s death, the now bankrupt court was forced to sell many of the family treasures to England’s King Charles I (many of the works are still in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum) just three years before it was sacked by the Habsburgs.

The first rooms of the palace are the least impressive. There is a thirteenth-century sculpture of a seated Virgil, a painting from 1494 by Domenico Morone showing the Expulsion of the Bonatosi from the square outside, and, perhaps most interestingly, the fragments of a half-finished fresco by Pisanello, discovered in 1969 behind two layers of plaster and thought to depict either an episode from an Arthurian romance or the (idealized) military exploits of the first marquis, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga. Whatever its subject, it’s a powerful piece of work, charged with energy, in which faces, costumes and landscape are minutely observed.

Further on, through the Sala dello Zodiaco, whose late sixteenth-century ceiling is spangled with stars and constellations, is the Salone dei Fiume (”Room of the Rivers”), in which Baroque trompe l’oeil goes over the top to create a mock garden complete with painted creepers and two ghastly fountains surrounded by stalactites and stalagmites. The Sala dei Specchi (”Hall of the Mirrors”) has a notice outside signed by Monteverdi, who worked as court musician to Vincenzo I and gave frequent concerts of new works - notably the world’s first modern opera, L’Orfeo , written in 1607. Vincenzo also employed Rubens, whose Adoration of the Magi in the Salone degli Arcieri , next door, shows the Gonzaga family of 1604, including Vincenzo with his handlebar moustache. The picture was originally part of a triptych, but Emperor troops carried off two-thirds of it after briefly occupying the town in 1797 and chopped the remaining third into saleable chunks of portraiture. Although most have been traced, and some returned to the palazzo, there are still a few gaps. Around the room is a curious frieze of horses, glimpsed behind curtains.

The Castello di San Giorgio contains the palace’s principal treasure, however: Mantegna’s frescoes of the Gonzaga family - among the painter’s most famous works, splendidly restored in the so-called Camera degli Sposi and depicting the Marquis Lodovico and his wife Barbara with their family. They’re naturalistic pieces of work, giving a vivid impression of real people, of the relationships between them and of the tensions surrounding something that is happening, or about to happen. In the main one Lodovico discusses a letter with a courtier while his wife looks on; their youngest daughter leans on her mother’s lap, about to bite into an apple, while an older son and daughter (possibly Barbarina) look towards the door, where an ambassador from another court is being welcomed - lending some credence to the theory that negotiations are about to take place for Barbarina’s marriage. The other fresco, The Meeting , takes place out of doors against a landscape of weird rock formations and an imaginary city with the Gonzagan arms above the gate. Divided into three sections by imitation pilasters, it shows Gonzagan retainers with dogs and a horse in attending on Lodovico, who is welcoming his son Francesco back from Rome, where he had just become the first Gonzaga to be prefabricated a cardinal. In the background are the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III and the King of Denmark - a selection which apparently annoyed the Duke of Milan, who was incensed that the “two most wretched men in the world” had been included while he had been omitted. Lodovico’s excuse was that he would have included the duke had he not objected so strongly to Mantegna’s uncompromising portrait style. If you have time before the guide sweeps you out, have a look at the ceiling, another nice piece of trompe l’oeil, in which two women, peering down from a balustrade, have balanced a tub of plants on a pole and appear to be on the verge of letting it tumble into the room - an illusionism that was to be crucial in the development of the Gonzaga’s next resident artist of any note, Giulio Romano, whose Palazzo Te should not be missed.

Finally, the private apartments of Isabella d’Este , on the ground floor, are sometimes on view. Though they once housed works by Michelangelo, Mantegna and Perugino, only the unmoveable decorations remain - inlaid cupboards and intricately carved ceilings and doors. A ruthless employer, Isabella would threaten her artists and craftsmen with the dungeon if she thought they were working too slowly, and had no compunction about bullying Mantegna on his death-bed to give her a piece of sculpture she particularly coveted. She was more deferential to Leonardo da Vinci, however, who did two drawings of her but ignored her suggestion that one be converted into a portrait of Christ. Isabella also collected dwarfs, whose job it was to cheer her up while her husband was away fighting. For centuries it was assumed that the suite of miniature rooms beyond Isabella’s apartments was built for the dwarfs; in fact it’s a scaled-down version of the St John Lateran basilica in Rome, built for Vincenzo.

There’s not much to see within cushy reach of Mantua, and the countryside - the Mantuan plain - is for the most part flat and dull. The closest real attraction is at GRAZIE , a ten-minute bus ride west, where the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie has an interior chock-full of weird votive offerings, wax and wooden mannequins in clothes petrified with age standing in niches, surrounded by wooden hearts, breasts, hands and feet nailed up by the recipients of miracle cures. There’s even a stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling. Alongside the church, a path leads down to the marshes, rich in rare birds and wildlife. For boat trips along the Po contact Montonavi Andes at Piazza Sordello 8, Mantua (tel 0376.322.875) or Motonave Sebastiano N. at Via Ostigliese est 272, Governolo (tel 0376.668.134). Further out, fifty minutes by bus from Mantua bus station (3-9 daily), SABBIONETA is a more interesting target, an odd little place with the air of an forsaken film set, where imperious Renaissance palaces gaze blankly over deserted and dusty piazzas. The town is the result of the psychoneurotic dream of Vespasiano Gonzaga, member of a minor branch of the Mantuan family, to create the saint city, but it has now been forsaken by all but the oldest inhabitants, a handful of agricultural workers and the tourist board.

Sabbioneta was an anachronism even as it was being built. In the sixteenth century it was no more than an agricultural village, nominal capital of an insignificant state on the Mantuan border struggling to maintain its independence from the foreign powers who had colonized most of Lombardy. Unperturbed, its ruler, Duke Vespasiano, was keen to create an saint state on the model of ancient Athens and Rome, and he uprooted his subjects from their farm cottages, forcing them to build and then inhabit the new city, which held a Greek and Latin Academy and a Palladian theatre as well as a couple of ducal residences. After Vespasiano’s death, Sabbioneta returned to - and has remained in - its former state: a small agricultural village like hundreds of others throughout Italy.

To get inside any of the town’s buildings you have to take a guided tour . These are arranged by the tourist office at Via Gonzaga 31 (April-Sept Tues-Sat 9.30am-12.30pm & 2.30-6pm, Sun 9.30am-12.30pm & 2.30-7pm; Oct-March closes one hour earlier; tel 0375.52.039, www.unh.net/sabbioneta ), by the main piazza and bus stop. The tours start with the Palazzo del Giardino , Vespasiano’s private residence, decorated with frescoed models of civilized behaviour, ranging from Roman emperors to the Three Graces. Next stop is the Teatro Olimpico , copied from Palladio’s theatre of the same study in Vicenza, in which the only spectators are pallid marble gods, fake-bronze emperors and ghostly painted courtiers. The Palazzo Ducale , around the corner, holds painted wooden statues of four of the Gonzagas, including Vespasiano (with the ruffle and beard), sitting imperiously on horseback. What remains of the palace’s decor is likewise concerned with the show of strength - frescoed elephants and friezes of eagles and lions. Close by, the Chiesa dell’Incoronata is remarkable mainly for its trompe l’oeil roof, which appears to be three times higher in than out - perhaps an apt comment on Vespasiano, a bronze statue of whom sits beneath, dressed as a Roman emperor and looking reluctant to leave his dream city.

Mantua is an cushy place to eat well and cheaply, with plenty of reasonably priced restaurants throughout its centre, many serving Mantuan specialities like spezzatino di Mantua (normally donkey stew), agnoli in brodo (pasta stuffed with cheese and sausage in broth) or the delicious tortelli di zucca (pasta stuffed with pumpkin). On a budget , there are a couple of decent self-service places - Il Punto , almost opposite the train station on Via Solferino 36 (daily except Sun noon-2.30pm & 7.30-9.15pm), and the Virgiliana , Piazza Virgiliana 57, although this is only open weekday lunchtimes (noon-2pm). If all you want is a pizza, try Piedigrotto , Corso Libertá 15 (closed Wed), and Bella Napoli , Piazza Cavalotti 14 (closed Tues), both decent, standard pizzerias on the edge of the old town. La Masseria , Piazza Broletto 7 (closed Thurs), is a popular, lively place with a wide selection of other dishes as well as good pizzas.

Among restaurants with a more local flavour, the Leoncino Rosso , just through the arch off Piazza Broletto (closed Sun), is friendly and informal - and a good place just to drink - and the Taverna Santa Barbara , Piazza Santa Barbara 19 (closed Mon), inside the Palazzo Ducale complex itself, is an atmospheric setting for local specialities. Try also Ristorante Pavesi (closed Thurs), one of several very pleasant but more expensive options in Piazza Erbe, or Trattoria del Rio at Via Pescheria 23 (closed Fri), right by the fish market, which serves inexpensive traditional Mantovan dishes. For just a drink , either before or after dinner, try Birreria Oblo , Via Arrivabene 50, a pubby place with a great selection of beers, almost matched by a good range of sandwiches.

Mantua’s old centre is a ten-minute achievement from the train station on Piazza Don E. Leoni and the bus station , just beyond on Piazza Mondadori, off Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. Bus #1 runs from the train station to the centre of town. The tourist office , in the centre of town at Piazza Mantegna 6 - the entrance is actually on Piazza dell’Erbe (Mon-Sat 8.30am-12.30pm & 3-6pm, Sun 9.30am-12.30pm; tel 0376.328.253) - has the usual maps and hotel lists as well as information on boat and cycle trips in the Po Valley and agriturismo in the region. Bicycles can be rented by the hour or the day from La Rigola (tel 0376.366.677) at the end of Via Accademia on the lake. As in most parts of northern Italy, hotels get booked up quickly, and it’s advisable to phone ahead. Mantua has only one cheap hotel: the Peter Pan , Cittadella Piazza Giulia 3 (tel 0376.392.638; L60,000-90,000/¬30.99-46.48), ten minutes’ achievement crossways the lake from the centre. In the town itself, and right opposite the station, the ABC , Piazza Don Leoni 25 (tel 0376.322.329; L90,000-120,000/¬46.48-61.98), is good value with breakfast included and free use of bicycles, while the pleasant Bianchi Stazione , next door at Piazza Don Leoni 24 (tel 0376.326.465, fax 0376.321.504; L150,000-200,000/¬77.47-103.29), offers more comfort at correspondingly higher prices. Another possibility, right on the square overlooking the Palazzo Ducale, is the run-down Due Guerrieri , Piazza Sordella 52 (tel 0376.325.596, fax 0376.329.645; L150,000-200,000/¬77.47-103.29), and at the top end of the scale is the San Lorenzo , Piazza Concordia 14 (tel 0376.220.500, fax 0376.327.194; over L400,000/¬206.58). Unfortunately, there’s no youth hostel here, the only other option being the small (ten plots only) and expensive campsite , Corte Chiara (tel 0376.390.804; May-Sept), north of Mantua, outside of Porto Mantovano on the road to Marmirolo.