There is a museum in Trento that never closes, costs nothing and has no sign announcing it. It is the painted façades of the historic centre, and most of the people crossing Piazza Duomo photograph them without knowing what they are looking at.
That is not a figure of speech: on the front of a private house in Piazza Duomo there is a cycle of moral allegories copied from a book of emblems published in 1531, with Damocles seated under his sword and Fortune on a chariot drawn by stags. No plaque explains it.
This is also the part of Trento that rescues a badly timed day. The castle closes on Mondays, the Museo Diocesano closes on Tuesdays, but the façades are there every day of the year.
A fashion that came up the Adige
Why did an Alpine city start painting its façades like a Venetian one? Because for centuries Trento was not a mountain town, it was a junction on the road between Verona and the Brenner: goods, merchants and fashions passed through, and the habit of external fresco arrived by travelling up the river.
The practice spreads in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the Venetian model, and in Trento it reaches its fullest expression in the sixteenth century, particularly between the opening years of the century and the 1570s. These are the same decades in which Bernardo Cles was building the Magno Palazzo at the castle and Santa Maria Maggiore: the whole city was being rewritten at once.
That the effect struck contemporaries too is on record. In 1614 Pierre Le Monnier noted that Trento had fine houses, most of them painted with figures, stories and coats of arms. In 1673 Michelangelo Mariani counted seventeen still frescoed.
Casa Cazuffi: a treatise on morals across a façade
The façade to start from is in Piazza Duomo, on the side opposite the cathedral, and it is the first of the two twin houses.
Casa Cazuffi was rebuilt in Renaissance style by Tommaso Cazuffi, its owner and a doctor of law, and frescoed by Marcello Fogolino around 1532-1535. Fogolino works in monochrome over an azurite ground, now largely deteriorated, with figures meant to look like sculpture applied to the wall: it was a fashion that had spread in Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and finding it this far north says a good deal about how up to date Trento was.
The cycle reads across two registers, and it is worth taking slowly because every figure means something precise.
The upper register holds three allegories of fortune:
- Nemesis, the goddess of justice, balanced on the wheel: the check on arrogance;
- Occasion, a female figure running on the wheel surrounded by putti, that is the opportunity to be seized as it passes;
- the Chariot of Fortune, with the two-faced goddess, one face of light and one of shadow, on a chariot drawn by stags.
The lower register holds three exemplary scenes: a blind hurdy-gurdy player, Damocles at the table of Dionysius with the famous sword hanging over his head, and a knight helping a beggar.
The reward, for anyone who gets this far, is knowing where they come from. The images derive from the Emblematum Liber of Andrea Alciato, published in 1531, that is from the book that invented the emblem as a genre and was in those years becoming required reading for every educated person in Europe. Tommaso Cazuffi, doctor of law, had a bibliography painted on the front of his house: it was a way of telling passers-by what he had read.
Casa Rella, next door and unattributed
Attached to Casa Cazuffi is Casa Rella, frescoed around 1540, and its attribution is still uncertain.
The two façades together form a single cycle unfolding across several levels, and among the figures easiest to identify are mythological monsters: Geryon, with a woman’s head and a serpent’s body, is easy to spot on the second floor of the first house from the left.
These are the two buildings that end up in every photograph of Trento, along with the Neptune fountain standing in front of them.
Palazzo Geremia: an emperor on a private house
From Piazza Duomo you turn into Via Belenzani, and this is where looking up pays off even more, because here the painted façades stand one after another.
The high point is Palazzo Geremia, built at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and probably the most distinguished private building in the historic centre. The decoration covers the whole front on Via Belenzani and is attributed to a Venetian painter active around 1502-1504.
The subject is the remarkable part: alongside the allegories are scenes featuring emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg. A family of merchants had its relationship with the emperor painted on the front of its house, which in the prince-bishopric of Trento was both a boast and a political position.
A little further along the same street stands Palazzo Thun, now the town hall, completing the painted frontage.
Palazzo Quetta Alberti Colico and the others
Palazzo Quetta Alberti Colico carries Renaissance decoration by Marcello Fogolino, the same painter as Casa Cazuffi, from the 1530s: here the repertoire is different, with grotesques and trompe-l’œil marble heads.
The oldest external decoration in the city is instead on Casa Balduini, in Piazza Duomo: green festoons and floral friezes on white plaster, attributed to a Sacchetto of Verona. It is the proof that the fashion arrived from the south, and that it took hold first as ornament rather than as narrative.
How many actually survive
Seventeen in 1673, and how many now? The most serious answer comes from a survey carried out by Italia Nostra with the municipal historical archive, the provincial heritage authority and the university: about a hundred and forty frescoes have been catalogued, spread between the historic centre and the Cristo Re, Bolghera and San Giuseppe districts.
Careful: that number does not count a hundred and forty Renaissance façades. The survey covers external decoration from the Middle Ages to the present, so it takes in sixteenth-century cycles, devotional madonnas, shop signs and nineteenth and twentieth-century work together. The figurative cycles of the sixteenth century, the ones worth walking around with your head up for, are a handful, and nearly all of them stand between Piazza Duomo and Via Belenzani.
How to look at them
Details checked on 6 September 2026 on the records of the municipality of Trento and of Trentino Cultura. The façades are outdoors and have no opening hours, but a few things change the visit considerably.
Tickets. There are none: these are façades on a public street and you look at them for free. The interiors of Palazzo Geremia and Palazzo Thun are not part of the route: they are municipal offices and open only on special occasions.
When to go. Light matters more than anything else. Piazza Duomo takes the sun in the first half of the day, Via Belenzani is narrow and at midday one side stays in shadow: the best moment for the two houses in Piazza Duomo is the morning, for Via Belenzani the afternoon.
What to bring. Light binoculars or your phone’s zoom, because the upper register of Casa Cazuffi is some ten metres up and the monochrome detail is lost to the naked eye.
Getting there. Piazza Duomo is ten minutes on foot from Trento station. From there to Via Belenzani is one minute, and the whole façade route fits inside three hundred metres.
How long it takes. Walking and no more, twenty minutes. Really looking, with the allegories identified one by one, a good hour.
The part of Trento most easily lost
The painted façades have no ticket office, so they end up in no itinerary, and people passing through Trento for the castle and the Council walk past without stopping.
That is a pity, because they are the most characteristic thing in the city: a frontier principality painting the fashions of Rome and the Veneto onto itself, with allegories taken from a European bestseller barely off the press and an emperor on a merchant’s house.
Photographs: the Cazuffi-Rella houses by Heineken24 (CC BY-SA 3.0), the two fresco details by Sailko (CC BY 3.0), Palazzo Geremia by Checcoxx (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
Read also: What to see in Trento in two days, Buonconsiglio Castle and the Magno Palazzo and Trento Cathedral and Santa Maria Maggiore
If you would rather have the façades explained while you walk, the guided walking tour of the historic centre starts in Piazza Fiera and lasts two hours.
