When I decided that I would be visiting the city of Palmanova, I knew that this would be one of the more challenging places to appreciate. I have a general idea of what the place is all about and what is so interesting about it. Now that I am here, I realize the difficulty for seeing what is so interesting about it. Palmanova is a fortified city built by the republic of Venice. It was built with a lot of thought and that also includes its design. It is designed as a nine pointed star. The points themselves have arrow like points which facilitate the defense of each point.

Invading a fortress like this won’t be easy. The main gates will be very heavily defended so it is natural to find a weakness in the walls surrounding the city. Walking along the walls of the fortress, you can see the individual points of the star which form the walls of the city. The points are not one homogeneous wall, but they have paths which lead further inside the wall only to end up at a dead end. This is designed to trap potential invaders and make them easy to get rid of since they will be surrounded by other parts of the defensive wall. These walls were built almost five hundred years ago and they still stand to this day. You can see how some parts of the walls are older and others have already been restored. For the most part the walls are still here and it is a pleasure to just walk along it.

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