Reflections of Sabbioneta

You simply must go:

Not far from Mantua, sitting in a placid landscape on the left bank of the Po River lies an extraordinary walled, miniature, Renaissance city, lying within an enormous star-shaped fortress.

Passing through the small narrow arched gate you leave behind the modern world and enter Sabbioneta, designed in the second half of the 16th century by Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna (1531–1591), a man obsessed with building his own city following a macabre and arisocratic melancholic life, indeed he once said to a friend “My only amusement is to raise new walls and to give life to material work in contrast to my empty soul”*…
* Quotation from ‘A traveller in Italy’ by H.V.Morton