Contra Porti is the single most important street for understanding what Vicenza actually is: a city whose wealthy families, across several centuries, built palaces that express their ambitions in stone. The street runs through the historic centre between the Corso and the Piazza del Castello, and it holds a remarkable concentration of Renaissance and Gothic architecture.
Walking here is free and requires no admission ticket. The palaces line both sides of a narrow street — some restored to gleaming white stone, others weathered and slightly neglected — and the effect is of walking through a compressed architectural museum that also happens to be a functioning residential street. Palladio's Palazzo Thiene is the landmark, but the pre-Palladian Gothic buildings are equally fine in their different register.