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Ten minutes’ achievement away from Monte Bérico is the Villa Valmarana “ai Nani” , an undistinguished house prefabricated extraordinary by the decorations of Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo (mid-March to April Tues & Fri 2.30-5.30pm, Wed, Thurs, Sat & Sun 10am-noon & 2.30-5.30pm; May-Sept Tues-Sat 10am-noon & 3-6pm; Oct-Nov 5 Tues-Sat 10am-noon & 2-5pm; L10,000/¬5.16). Nani , by the way, means “Dwarves”, the significance of which becomes clear when you see the garden wall. To get there, go back down the hill, head along Via M. D’Azeglio for 100m, then turn right into the cobbled Via S. Bastiano, which ends at the villa.

There are two parts to the house: the Palazzina, containing six rooms frescoed with brilliant virtuosity by Giambattista (scenes based on Virgil, Tasso and Ariosto - you’re handed a brief guide to the paintings at the entrance); and the Foresteria, one room of which is frescoed by Giambattista and six by Giandomenico, whose predilections are a little less heroic than his father’s

The Duomo was bombed flat in 1944 and carefully reconstructed after the war; it’s a rather gloomy place, chiefly distinguished as one of the few Italian cathedrals to be overwhelmed by its secular surroundings. Far more interesting is Santa Corona (daily: summer 8.30am-noon & 2.30-6pm; winter 9.30am-noon & 3-6pm), on the other side of the Corso Palladio (at the Piazza Matteotti end), a Dominican church dating from the mid-thirteenth century. Here you’ll find two of the three great church paintings in Vicenza - The Baptism of Christ , a late work by Giovanni Bellini, and The Adoration of the Magi , painted in 1573 by Paolo Veronese. The cloisters now house a run-of-the-mill Museo Naturalistico-Archeologico .

The nearby Santo Stefano (Mon-Sat 8.30-10am & 5.30-7pm) contains the third of the city’s fine church paintings: Palma Vecchio’s typically stolid and voluptuous Madonna and Child with SS George and Lucy.

At the hub of the city, the Piazza dei Signori , stands the most awesome of Palladio’s creations - the Basilica . Designed in the late 1540s (but not finished until the second decade of the next century), this was Palladio’s first public project and the one that secured his reputation. The monumental regularity of the basilica disguises the fact that the Palladian building is effectively a stupendous piece of buttressing - the Doric and Ionic colonnades enclose the fifteenth-century hall of the city council, an unstable structure that had defied a number of attempts to prop it up before Palladio’s solution was place into effect. The vast Gothic hall is often used for good contemporary structure exhibitions (Tues-Sun: summer 10am-7pm; winter 9am-5pm; price varies).

As in the sixteenth century, a regular fruit, vegetable and flower market is pitched at the back of the basilica, in the Piazza dell’ Erbe ; if you’re shopping for picnic food, you’ll save money by going down the slope and over the river, where the shops are a good bit cheaper. On Tuesdays a general market spreads along the roads between the basilica and the duomo.

A late Palladio building, the unfinished Loggia del Capitaniato , faces the basilica crossways the Piazza dei Signori. Built as accommodation for the Venetian military commander of the city, it’s decorated with reliefs in celebration of the Venetian victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571.

Santo Stefano faces a corner of the huge Palazzo Thiene , another of Palladio’s palaces. It was planned to occupy the entire block down to Corso Palladio, but in the end work progressed no further than the addition of this wing to the existing fifteenth-century house. The deception of the old building is in Contrà Porti, a street that amply demonstrates the way in which the builders of Vicenza grafted new houses onto old without disrupting the symmetry of the street; the palaces here span two centuries, yet the overall impression is one of cohesion. Facing Palazzo Thiene is the Palazzo Barbaran, which houses a research institute for Palladian structure ( www.cisapalladio.org ) and often has excellent exhibitions, usually, but not always, on classical architects.

Outstanding buildings on Contrà Porti are the fourteenth-century Palazzo Colleoni Porto (no. 19) and Palladio’s neighbouring Palazzo Iseppo Porto , designed a few years after the Thiene palace. The parallel Corso A. Fogazzaro completes the itinerary of major Palladian buildings, with the Palazzo Valmarana (no. 16), perhaps the most anomaly of Palladio’s projects - notice the gigantic stucco figures at the sides of the facade, where you’d expect columns to be.

At the end of Contrà Santa Corona, two blocks easterly of Contrà Porti, the Palazzo Leoni-Montanari