Piazza della Loggia

Brescia's main square, a Renaissance masterpiece with a dark 1974 story

Piazza della Loggia is the central square of Brescia's historic centre — a unified Renaissance ensemble built between the 15th and 16th centuries under Venetian rule. The square is named for the Palazzo della Loggia on its north side, a magnificent Venetian-style building with an open ground-floor arcade, now the town hall, whose construction stretched from 1492 to 1574 and involved designs attributed (at various stages) to Jacopo Sansovino and Palladio.

Flanking the square are two matching clock towers and a pair of elaborate colonnaded buildings on the south side. The overall effect is one of the most harmonious Renaissance squares in Lombardy. Cafes line the arcades beneath the Loggia; this is where Brescians sit for their morning coffee and their evening aperitivo. The square connects directly to the adjacent Piazza della Vittoria, the Fascist-era replacement quarter designed by Marcello Piacentini in the 1930s — a deliberate stylistic contrast worth noticing.

things to do sight
A story
On 28 May 1974, a bomb planted in the square by neo-fascists exploded during an anti-fascist trade union rally, killing eight people and injuring over a hundred. The attack was one of the worst of Italy's Years of Lead. The clock tower stopped at the moment of the explosion; the town replaced it with an identical clock that still bears a plaque in memory of the dead.

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