Mantua
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Mantua And Sabbioneta, Inscribed 2008), With Mantegna'S Camera Degli Sposi Of 1474 Inside The Gonzaga Palazzo Ducale · Mantua, Lombardy
Mantua is surrounded on three sides by artificial lakes dug in the twelfth century, which is why it looks like it is floating and why it stayed rich enough for the Gonzaga to spend three hundred years commissioning things. Their palace is less a building than a small walled town of five hundred rooms, and inside it is one room that justifies the whole trip: a chamber Mantegna painted in the 1470s where the family stands about on the walls looking back at you and the ceiling opens into a painted sky with figures leaning over the parapet, which is the first time anybody had done that. On the edge of town the same family built a pleasure villa where Giulio Romano frescoed a room with the giants being crushed under collapsing masonry, painted so the walls seem to fall in on the viewer. Between the two is a quiet brick city of arcades that most people pass on the way to Verona. Book the Camera slot before you book anything else, because it is timed, capped and short, and everything else here can wait.
Piazza Sordello 40, Mantua, Lombardy, 46100, Italy
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: Palazzo Ducale is a state museum, so expect a weekly closing day, a last admission well before closing, and the Camera degli Sposi on TIMED CAPPED SLOTS booked with the ticket. Palazzo Te is municipal and keeps its own hours with a short Monday. Sant'Andrea opens daily with a long midday interval. The squares, arcades and lakeside path never close. Boat trips are seasonal and weather-dependent. Confirm all of it, and the Camera booking above all.