What is a piazza in Italy?

A piazza is an Italian town square: an open space inside a town, closed in by buildings, where people meet and where the market, the main church and the town government have traditionally faced each other. The word comes from the Latin platea, a broad street, the same root as English place and Spanish plaza.

What does piazza mean in English?

Square. The Treccani dictionary defines a piazza as a free area, more or less spacious, that opens up inside the fabric of a town, bounded by buildings and used as a meeting place, often the center of a town’s economic and political life.

The word has travelled a long way. Latin platea came from the Greek plateia, the feminine of platys, meaning broad, so the first sense was a wide street rather than an open square. Spanish turned it into plaza, French into place, Portuguese into praça and German into Platz. English borrowed piazza itself between about 1575 and 1585, according to Dictionary.com, and in American English it also picked up a second meaning: a large porch or veranda.

In Italian the word can also mean simply the market, which tells you what usually happened in one.

What is a square called in Italy?

Usually piazza, but not always, and the exceptions say a lot about the town.

Campo in Venice: a campo is a square, larger than a campiello, where lanes meet. Piazza San Marco is the only square in the city called a piazza.
Il Campo in Siena: the main square is called the campo, and it is where the Palio horse race is run on 2 July and 16 August.
Largo: a small open space where several streets meet, or where a street widens out.
Piazzale: a fairly large open area, which Treccani notes need not work as a piazza at all.

Shape is part of the history too. Rome’s Piazza Navona is a long oval because it follows the outline of the Stadium of Domitian, built in the first century.

What happens in a piazza?

Everything a town does in public. The main piazza is where the institutions sit across from each other, typically a church on one side and the town hall on another, and where the market, festivals, processions, political rallies and concerts take place. People also simply use it: they cross it on the way somewhere, sit on its steps and arrange to meet in it.

Piazza Maggiore as an example

Bologna’s main square is close to a textbook case. The commune began clearing the site around 1200, buying up and knocking down houses and towers to make room for a market and a setting for its own government. The result is about 115 by 60 meters, roughly 6,900 square meters.

Every side has a job. The Basilica di San Petronio, begun in 1390, takes the south side. The town hall, Palazzo d’Accursio, is on the west. The old seat of the city’s chief magistrate, Palazzo del Podestà, closes the north. Our page on when Piazza Maggiore was built has the full sequence.

It still works the way a piazza should. People sit on the raised granite platform in the middle, the crescentone, added in 1934. In summer the square turns into a free open-air cinema; in 2026 Sotto le Stelle del Cinema ran from 15 June to 14 August. On the night of 31 December the city burns the Vecchione, a large effigy of the old year, in the middle of the square.

The buildings are easier to read with someone pointing at them. A two-hour guided walk through the medieval center that finishes on Piazza Maggiore does exactly that, and our tours page compares the others.