From the air Palmanova is a perfect nine-pointed star, and even from the saddle you can feel the geometry. The roads come in through monumental gates, cross the moats and ramparts, and run dead straight to a vast hexagonal piazza in the middle, where the whole town seems to stop and look at itself. It is one of the purest examples of an ideal Renaissance city ever built, and it sits on the flat Friulian plain between Udine and the Adriatic like a diagram that somebody forgot to take back.
The Venetian Republic founded it in 1593 as a fortress against the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, who were both pressing on its eastern border. Every detail was designed for defence: the bastions, the angles of fire, the radial streets that let troops reach any part of the walls quickly. Napoleon's engineers later added an outer ring of fortifications, which is why the earthworks look so layered. In 2017 Palmanova joined the World Heritage list as part of the Venetian Works of Defence, alongside places like Bergamo and Zadar.
Riding here is flat-land riding: straight, fast provincial roads through maize fields and vineyards, with the Julian Alps visible on a clear day to the north and the lagoons a short way south. The A4 motorway passes close by, but the back roads towards Aquileia, Cividale or the Collio wine hills are much more fun. Coming through one of the three gates, Porta Udine, Porta Cividale or Porta Aquileia, is a small event in itself: stone arches, a tunnel through the ramparts, and suddenly you are inside.
Walk up onto the bastions if you can. The grassy ramparts and the moats are now a park, full of birds and quiet paths, and from the top the star shape becomes readable. In the evening the piazza fills with people taking their passeggiata, and the cafés around it are the best place to sit with an espresso or a glass of Friulano and watch the light fade on the arcades.
Palmanova is a small town, but it has fuel just outside the walls, shops, bakeries and restaurants. Cervignano del Friuli, about ten kilometres south, is larger and close to Aquileia, whose Roman ruins and great mosaic floors in the basilica make an excellent second stop on any ride through this corner of Italy.