Ferrara
"A moat in the middle of a city always tells you something about the family that built it."
A perfectly preserved Renaissance capital, flat as a tabletop and built for bicycles, ruled for centuries by a family who took castle-building personally.
Ferrara does not announce itself the way Florence or Venice does. There’s no single postcard image that tourists carry into the city expecting to check off — which is exactly why I liked it so much. It reveals itself slowly, on a bicycle, which is the only sensible way to see it: the whole historic center is flat, criss-crossed by quiet cobbled streets, and the locals ride everywhere, baskets loaded with market vegetables, in a way that makes you feel mildly embarrassed to be walking.
At the dead center of town sits the Castello Estense, a genuine moated fortress-castle, complete with drawbridges, that the ruling Este family built in 1385 — not for show, but because they had just put down a tax revolt and wanted somewhere defensible to sleep. I walked the perimeter at dusk and watched the reflection of its four brick towers ripple in the water, swans gliding past like they owned the place. Underneath the castle are dungeon cells you can actually descend into, a reminder that Renaissance elegance was always built on something harder.
The City Ahead of Its Time
What makes Ferrara a UNESCO World Heritage Site isn’t any single monument but the city plan itself. In 1492, Duke Ercole I d’Este commissioned architect Biagio Rossetti to expand the medieval town with wide straight avenues, planned intersections, and green space — the so-called Addizione Erculea, considered by historians to be the first example of modern urban planning in Europe. Walking down the Corso Ercole I d’Este today, arrow-straight and lined with Renaissance palazzi, you’re walking through five-hundred-year-old city planning theory that still works better than most of what came after it.
Salama da Sugo and a Jewish Quarter That Endured
Ferrara’s food is stubbornly its own. Salama da sugo, a slow-cooked spiced pork sausage served with mashed potato, is a dish I’d never encountered anywhere else in Italy — rich, almost gamey, clearly built for a cold flat plain rather than a coastal climate. The cappellacci di zucca, pumpkin-stuffed pasta parcels, showed up on nearly every menu I saw, a reminder that this region takes its squash as seriously as its meat.
Ferrara also has one of Italy’s oldest Jewish communities, dating back to the 13th century and protected under Este rule at a time when Jews were being expelled from much of Europe. The old Ghetto, along Via Mazzini and Via Vignatagliata, still has its synagogues and narrow streets intact, though the community was devastated during the Nazi occupation — a history Giorgio Bassani wrote about unforgettably in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, set right here.
When to go: September, for the Palio di Ferrara — one of Italy’s oldest horse-and-foot races, older even than Siena’s — or spring, when cycling the city walls in the late afternoon light is close to perfect.