Did You Know That Treviso’s History Was Shaped by Remarkable Women? A Guide for International Women’s Day

Did You Know That Treviso’s History Was Shaped by Remarkable Women? A Guide for International Women’s Day There is a fresco in the Church of San Nicolò in Treviso that almost nobody talks about. It is not the most famous work in the building — that distinction belongs to the extraordinary portraits by Tomaso da Modena in the adjacent Seminary, which stopped me cold the first time I saw them as a child and have never quite let me go. But in the nave of San Nicolò, painted onto the pillar closest to the altar on the left side, there is a portrait of a woman. She is painted with the same gravity and psychological precision that Tomaso reserved for his most important subjects. She looks directly outward. She does not defer. Nobody knows with certainty who she is. But she has been looking out from that pillar for nearly seven hundred years, and on March 8 — International Women’s Day — I find myself thinking about her, and about all the women whose names we do know, who shaped this city and this territory in ways that the standard history books have been slow to acknowledge. I am Igor Scomparin. I was born and raised in the Veneto, I have held an official Tour Guide License since 2007, and I have spent nearly two decades learning to read this city properly. What I have learned, among many other things, is that the history of Treviso is also, in fundamental ways, the history of the women who lived in it, worked in it, created in it, and sometimes governed it — and that their stories are among the most extraordinary the Veneto has to offer. Gaia da Camino: The Woman Who Ruled Treviso If you have read Dante’s Divine Comedy — and if you have not, Treviso gives you excellent reasons to start — you will know the name Gaia da Camino. She appears in the eighth canto of Purgatorio, mentioned by her father Gherardo da Camino in a context that has been debated by scholars for seven centuries. Dante’s reference is brief and slightly ambiguous, which is exactly the kind of thing that keeps literary historians in business. What is not ambiguous is what Gaia da Camino represented in the history of this city. Born around 1270, Gaia was the daughter of Gherardo da Camino, the captain and lord of Treviso at a time when the city was one of the most powerful in the Veneto. She was, by all contemporary accounts, exceptionally educated for a woman of her era — fluent in Latin, a patron of poets and scholars, a presence at the court of her father that went far beyond the decorative role assigned to daughters of powerful men in medieval Italy. After her father’s death in 1306 and the subsequent collapse of da Camino power in Treviso, she disappears from the historical record, but the impression she left was strong enough for Dante to mention her by name in his masterwork. Treviso has been somewhat slow to claim her as the civic figure she deserves to be recognised as. But stand in Piazza dei Signori on a clear March evening, look up at the Palazzo dei Trecento where the da Camino family once held court, and know that a woman walked these stones with authority and learning at a time when the very idea of a learned woman was considered extraordinary. Tomaso da Modena and the Women He Painted The greatest artist to work in medieval Treviso was not from Treviso — he was from Modena, as his name suggests, and he spent the most productive years of his career in this city in the mid-fourteenth century. His work in the Church of San Nicolò and the Seminary of San Nicolò represents one of the high points of pre-Renaissance Italian art, and one of the things that makes it so remarkable is his treatment of women. In an era when women in painting were typically either Madonnas — idealised, distant, symbolic — or allegorical figures representing virtues or vices, Tomaso da Modena painted women with a directness and psychological weight that anticipated the Renaissance by nearly a century. His portraits — technically of saints and religious figures, but painted with the specificity of real faces, real expressions, real inner lives — include women who look as if they are thinking something the painter found worth recording. This is not a minor point. The history of Western art is largely a history of women observed. Tomaso, in fourteenth-century Treviso, was doing something more interesting than observation. He was paying attention. If you visit the Seminary of San Nicolò — which requires a guided visit and is one of the most rewarding art experiences in the Veneto — look carefully at the faces. Look for the ones that look back. Caterina Cornaro: The Queen Who Came Home to the Veneto She was not born in Treviso. But the story of Caterina Cornaro is so deeply woven into the fabric of the Veneto — and her final years were spent so close to Treviso, in the hills that I drive through regularly on the way to Asolo — that no account of the women who shaped this territory can omit her. Caterina Cornaro was born in Venice in 1454, into one of the most powerful noble families of the Republic. In 1468, at the age of fourteen, she was formally adopted by the Republic of Venice as a “Daughter of the Republic” — a legal manoeuvre designed to give Venice a political foothold in Cyprus — and betrothed to King James II of Cyprus. She was married at sixteen, widowed at seventeen, and left to rule Cyprus as regent for her infant son, who died within the year, leaving her as sole monarch of the island. She ruled Cyprus for fifteen years. Not as a figurehead, not as a temporary placeholder, but as a functioning monarch navigating the extraordinary pressures of Venetian commercial interests, Ottoman military expansion, and the internal politics of a kingdom that had no particular reason to be loyal to a Venetian widow. She did so with a combination of intelligence, political skill, and what her contemporaries described as a natural dignity that commanded respect even from those who would have preferred her gone. In 1489, under enormous pressure from Venice, she abdicated and was returned to the mainland — given the town of Asolo, in the hills above Treviso, as her court in exile. She transformed it into one of the great cultural centres of the Italian Renaissance. Pietro Bembo — the poet and humanist who would later become one of the most influential literary figures of the sixteenth century — based his celebrated dialogue Gli Asolani there, naming the genre of conversation it recorded after the town she ruled. The court of Asolo under Caterina Cornaro attracted painters, poets, musicians, and scholars. She made a small hill town in the Treviso province, for a decade, one of the most intellectually vibrant places in Italy. She died in Venice in 1510. But her presence is still felt in Asolo — in the castle where she held court, in the streets that have barely changed in five hundred years, in the extraordinary quality of light on the hills that surrounds the town and that painters have been trying to capture ever since. If you want to understand what one remarkable woman did with exile, Asolo is forty minutes from Treviso and one of the most beautiful places in the Veneto. The Beguines and the Women Who Built Community Medieval Treviso, like many prosperous northern Italian cities, had a significant community of Beguines — laywomen who chose to live in religious community without taking full monastic vows, dedicating themselves to prayer, charitable work, and often to textile production and trade. The Beguine movement is one of the most fascinating and least-known chapters of medieval women’s history. At a time when the options available to women were essentially marriage, the convent, or dependency on male relatives, the Beguines created a third way: independent religious community, economic self-sufficiency, intellectual life. Many Beguines were highly educated. Some wrote theology. Several were condemned as heretics precisely because they were too educated and too independent. In Treviso, the traces of this world are embedded in the urban fabric — in the names of streets, in the locations of former convents and charitable houses, in the social geography of a medieval city that was more complex and more female than its official history suggests. Walking the canal district of Treviso with this history in mind transforms the experience. The buildings are the same. The water is the same. But the city becomes three-dimensional in a new way — a place where women were not simply present but active, organising, producing, creating. The Silk Women of Treviso Treviso in the medieval and early modern period was a significant centre of silk production. The Veneto region — with its tradition of mulberry cultivation, silkworm farming, and the extraordinary weaving skills developed through Venice’s long trade connections with the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world — was one of the most important textile-producing regions in Europe, and Treviso was a full participant in that economy. What most accounts of this industry omit is the degree to which it was a female economy. Silk reeling, spinning, and much of the weaving was women’s work — skilled, economically significant, passed from mother to daughter over generations. The women who worked in the silk industry of medieval Treviso were not marginal figures in the economic life of the city. They were central to it. Their labour produced one of the most valuable commodities in the European market, and the prosperity of the city rested, in part, on their hands. This is one of those historical realities that only becomes visible when you start looking for it. But once you see it, you see it everywhere — in the architecture of the palaces built on textile wealth, in the market economy of the Pescheria and its surrounding streets, in the economic vitality of a city that was, by the fourteenth century, one of the most prosperous in northeastern Italy. Emma Castelnuovo: The Mathematician Who Changed Education She was not from Treviso, but her story belongs to a tradition of northern Italian Jewish intellectual life that Treviso participated in, and she deserves to be known by anyone who cares about the history of women in Italian education. Emma Castelnuovo was born in Rome in 1913 into one of Italy’s most distinguished mathematical families. She became one of the most influential mathematics educators of the twentieth century, pioneering a hands-on, intuitive approach to teaching geometry that has influenced classrooms across the world. She taught actively until she was well into her nineties. She was awarded the first ever Felix Klein Medal by the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction in 2008, at the age of ninety-five. She survived the Nazi occupation of Rome during the Second World War, continued teaching in hiding, and returned to her classroom when the city was liberated. She believed, with a clarity that age only sharpened, that mathematics was not a subject to be feared but a way of understanding the world — and that this understanding should be available to everyone, regardless of background or perceived ability. Her life intersects with the Veneto in the broader story of Italian Jewish intellectual culture, and she represents a tradition of female intellectual achievement that the standard narratives of Italian history have been too slow to celebrate fully. On International Women’s Day, she is worth knowing. The Women of Treviso Today History is not only the past. Treviso today is a city where women run businesses, lead civic institutions, produce wine and radicchio and prosecco, teach in universities, practise medicine and law and architecture, make art and food and music. The same territory that produced Gaia da Camino and sheltered Caterina Cornaro’s court is producing, in the twenty-first century, women who are quietly shaping the economic and cultural life of one of Italy’s most dynamic regions. The food culture of Treviso — which I write about extensively and which brings many of my guests here — is in significant part the work of women. The grandmothers who codified the recipes for risotto al radicchio and pasta e fagioli and baccalà mantecato were women. The women who tended the silkworm farms and the radicchio fields and the vine rows on the steep Prosecco hills were women. The continuity of this food culture — its resistance to the homogenising pressures of industrial food production — is, in ways that rarely get acknowledged, the result of female knowledge and female stubbornness. When you eat well in Treviso, which you will, you are tasting the consequences of that stubbornness. It is worth pausing to acknowledge it. How to Spend International Women’s Day in Treviso If you happen to be in Treviso on March 8, here is how I would suggest spending the day in a way that honours both the city and the occasion. Begin in San Nicolò — early, before the church fills up. Stand in front of Tomaso da Modena’s painted portraits and spend five minutes really looking at the faces. Then walk through the city as if you are looking for the women in it — the streets named after female saints, the convents repurposed as schools and cultural centres, the market where the women vendors have been selling produce in the same spot, more or less, for centuries. Have lunch at one of the osterie in the historic centre where the cooking still reflects the domestic traditions of the Veneto. Order the radicchio. Drink the Prosecco. Think about whose hands made this possible. In the afternoon, if you have a car or have arranged a private tour, make the forty-minute drive to Asolo and walk the streets of the hill town that Caterina Cornaro transformed into a Renaissance court. Stand in the piazza and look out over the hills and understand that the view she looked at every morning for twenty years was this one — the same Veneto plain spreading south toward Venice, the same mountains rising north toward the Dolomites, the same quality of light that painters have been failing to fully capture ever since. Come back to Treviso for the aperitivo hour. There will be mimosa flowers on the tables — the yellow flower of International Women’s Day in Italy — and a spritz poured with Treviso’s characteristic generosity. It is, I think, a good way to spend a day in a city shaped by remarkable women. 📩 Get in touch to arrange a private guided tour of Treviso focused on the history and culture of the women who shaped it. I offer tailored itineraries for individuals, couples, and small groups. Frequently Asked Questions Who was Caterina Cornaro and what does she have to do with Treviso? Caterina Cornaro was a Venetian noblewoman born in 1454 who became Queen of Cyprus — the only female monarch in Venetian history. After abdicating under pressure from Venice in 1489, she was given the hill town of Asolo, approximately forty kilometres from Treviso, as her court in exile. She spent the final decades of her life there, transforming the town into one of the most important cultural centres of the Italian Renaissance. Her court attracted poets, painters, and humanist scholars, and Pietro Bembo immortalised it in his influential dialogue Gli Asolani. Asolo is easily visited as a day trip from Treviso and remains one of the most beautiful and historically resonant small towns in the Veneto. I include it in many of my private guided itineraries from Treviso. Is Treviso a good destination for cultural tourism beyond the food and wine? Absolutely — and International Women’s Day is actually an excellent lens through which to explore it. Treviso has one of the finest collections of medieval frescoes in northeastern Italy, a remarkably intact medieval urban fabric including its Renaissance city walls, and a history that connects it to some of the most fascinating stories in Italian Renaissance and medieval culture — including the story of Caterina Cornaro and her court at Asolo, the extraordinary art of Tomaso da Modena in San Nicolò, and the broader tradition of Venetian civic culture that shaped this city for five centuries. Most visitors come to Treviso for the food and discover the culture. The best visits combine both. What is the mimosa flower and why is it associated with International Women’s Day in Italy? The mimosa — the bright yellow flowering plant whose feathery blossoms appear in late winter and early March — became the symbol of International Women’s Day in Italy in 1946, chosen by the organisers of the first Italian celebration because it was inexpensive, widely available in late winter, and distinctively beautiful. Since then, the custom of giving mimosa flowers on March 8 has become one of the most universally observed Italian traditions, cutting across political and generational lines. In Treviso on March 8, you will find mimosa flowers in bars, restaurants, shops, and on the tables of homes throughout the city. If you are visiting, buying a small bunch from a market vendor and leaving it somewhere visible is one of those gestures that locals notice and appreciate. Igor Scomparin is a licensed Tour Guide and Tour Leader for the Veneto Region, certified Travel Agency Director, and founder of tourleadertreviso.com. He has been featured in Rick Steves’ travel guides to Italy and Europe since 2008.