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FERRARA |
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Hotels in Ferrara |
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Thirty minutes' train ride north of Bologna,
FERRARA
was the residence of the Este dukes, an eccentric dynasty that ranked as a major political force throughout Renaissance times. The Este kept the main artists of the day in commissions and built a town which, despite a relatively small population, was - and still is - one of the most elegant urban creations of the period.
When there was no heir, the Este were forced to hand over Ferrara to the papacy and leave for good. Life in Ferrara effectively collapsed: eighteenth-century travellers found a ghost town of empty streets and clogged-up canals infested with mosquitoes. Since then Ferrara has picked itself up, dusted itself down, and is now the centre of a key fruit-producing area, to which the expanse of neat, pollarded trees outside town testifies. It's a popular stop for tourists travelling up from Bologna to Venice, but they rarely stay, leaving the city centre enjoyably tourist-free by the evening
The Town
The bulky, moated
Castello Estense
(Tues-Sun 9.30am-5pm; L8000/¬4.13) dominates the centre of Ferrara, built in response to a late fourteenth-century uprising and generally held at the time to be a major feat of military engineering. But...
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