Gonzaga Renaissance city — three lakes, a palace the size of a town, and risotto alla pilota
Mantua (Mantova) is one of northern Italy's most undervisited UNESCO cities, ringed on three sides by artificial lakes created in the 12th century and dominated by the Palazzo Ducale — a 500-room Renaissance palace complex that rivals the Vatican in frescoed grandeur. The Gonzaga dynasty ruled here for four centuries and attracted Mantegna, Rubens, and Monteverdi; the city's risotto alla pilota (with pork sausage crumbled directly into the rice) and tortelli di zucca (pumpkin pasta with amaretti, mustard fruit, and nutmeg) are among the most distinctive dishes in all of Italian cuisine.
Mantua claims Virgil as a native son — the poet of the Aeneid was born in a village just outside the city walls around 70 BCE. The city was ruled from 1328 to 1708 by the Gonzaga family, one of Italy's most powerful Renaissance dynasties, who built the Palazzo Ducale into a city-within-a-city and commissioned the Camera degli Sposi fresco cycle by Andrea Mantegna (1474) — still one of the most technically astonishing illusionistic ceiling paintings ever made. After the Gonzaga fell and the Habsburgs looted the palace collections in the 1630 Sack of Mantua, many works ended up in the Louvre an…