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Map of Palmanova
A town that was drawn in full before it was built. Venice founded it in 1593, on the Friuli plain, as an ideal fortress: a nine-pointed star with a square at its centre and streets radiating out from it like the spokes of a wheel.
What you see on the map
The star. Nine pointed bastions, perfectly repeated, and outside them the moat, a blue line on the map that follows every angle. It is the shape that makes Palmanova a one-of-a-kind map.
The square and the spokes. At the centre, the great six-sided square; the main streets run out from it, three of them all the way to the town gates. Around it, rings of streets cross the spokes and leave wedge-shaped blocks.
Three walls from two eras. The first two lines of defence are Venetian; the third, the outermost, was added by the French in the early nineteenth century. Since 2017 it has been a World Heritage Site, together with other Venetian defences.
The countryside. The slopes and meadows of the fortress, in green, set the star apart from the farmland around it.
Which scale and paper suit it
1:7,000 on a 30 cm square, as in the picture, takes in the whole star with its moat and a little countryside around it.
1:3,000 on A3 moves in on the inner town: the square, the spokes and every house in the wedge-shaped blocks.
Always in a circle or a square. It is a symmetrical shape, and an elongated sheet leaves too much on both sides.
Make it yours
Open the example and compare it with Naarden, the other star town on this list: one is an ideal Renaissance plan; the other, a stronghold fitted around a town that already existed.
Change all the colours at once with a theme (black ink, sepia, night, blueprint) and download it as PNG. With a free account, also element by element, at 600 dpi, as vector PDF and as SVG.
