Renaissance Este city on bicycles — Castello Estense, cappellacci, and Po Delta sunsets
Ferrara is Italy's most completely preserved Renaissance city and the most bicycle-friendly in the country — more than one bicycle per inhabitant, a perfectly flat historic centre enclosed by its original 9km medieval walls (fully walkable and cyclable), and a Po Delta natural park at its doorstep. The Este dynasty made it one of the great Renaissance courts of Europe from the 13th to 16th centuries, attracting Ariosto, Tasso, Bellini, and Titian.
The Este dynasty ruled Ferrara from 1240 to 1598, transforming the medieval commune into one of the most magnificent courts of the Renaissance — building the moat-encircled Castello Estense, commissioning the Addizione Erculea (the first planned Renaissance urban extension in Italy), and hosting the most cultured court in Europe under Alfonso I and his wife Lucrezia Borgia. When the Este line died out in 1597, Pope Clement VIII seized the city as a Papal State; it entered a long decline and never industrialised, which inadvertently preserved its Renaissance fabric intact.