Since the establishment of the medieval city, the street presents itself as the central axis, the main street of the city.
From the entrance of the Old Gate to the Piazza Maggiore, it has been the commercial center of Este for five centuries. The shops and partly the facades have changed, but the effect of the porticoes, the crowded public places, and the weekly market is always the same: it makes us think "this is the city."
Also marked in the oldest maps as an extension of the Piazza Maggiore to the Old Gate, it is a street whose fronts are purpose-built for commerce, with lots of narrow, "Gothic" block structures (only in the late medieval period regrouped in twos or threes) and porticoed fronts.
The history of the commercial streets from medieval establishment has always been the same: it starts uniformly with "Gothic" lots, 4/5 meters wide for the commercial depth and a few rooms on the upper floor, and reaches the 1800s with many examples of small buildings that combine 2 or 3 lots and reorganize the accommodations above and the facades according to the style of the time: Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical.
The Tower represents the backdrop of the most frequented axis, opposed to the other defining backdrop, which is the gate to the walled Park of the Castle. Over time, both the military defense significance of the entire complex and the noble, almost feudal supremacy of the walled marks have been lost: today, the Tower-Castle ensemble is perceived as a pair of signs of civil power, symbolizing the city that lies in between: namely Via Matteotti and Piazza Maggiore.
The studied lighting enhances the role of the central and identity axis of the most representative street of Este, the first that comes to mind in the imagination of citizens and visitors.
From the porticoed street, one appreciates the shade, the shelter from the rain, the ancient pleasure of being in the center looking at shop windows and taking a stroll. When under the portico, architectural quality becomes secondary. Thus, the laborious leveling that, with false ceilings, resizing of pillars, and various decorations, seeks to achieve uniformity in archways of medieval origin, which have been heterogeneous since the beginning, both in depth and height, goes unnoticed.
In Venice, various types of chimneys were common until the 1800s, important for preventing fires in thatched or wooden roofs, but perhaps also differentiated to signal the rank of the head of the family in the hierarchy of maritime power. Perhaps in Este, some Venetian wanted to convey his status, or perhaps simply installed a chimney of a particular shape just to stand out in the disordered alignment of the roofs along the street.
In fact, there is an integration between Via Matteotti and Piazza Maggiore that forms a unique space in which the entire city recognizes itself, and it is evident that this effect is impossible to achieve without the pedestrianization of the entire system and the participation of merchants and public establishments that animate this central place.
