Approach Mantua from the north across the causeway and you see why it was so hard to conquer: the city rises from water on three sides, encircled by lakes formed from the river Mincio, its domes and towers reflected in the still surface. For nearly four centuries it belonged to the Gonzaga family, who turned a marshy town into one of the most brilliant courts of the Renaissance, and Mantua is listed by UNESCO together with Sabbioneta, the small ideal city that a branch of the same family built some thirty kilometres away.
Inside the Ducal Palace, a sprawling complex of courtyards and halls, the Camera degli Sposi painted by Andrea Mantegna is one of the treasures of Italian art, with its trompe l'oeil ceiling where figures peer down through a painted opening to the sky. At the other end of town, Palazzo Te, designed by Giulio Romano as a pleasure palace, has a room where giants seem to crash down around you. The Roman poet Virgil was born near Mantua, and the city has a calm, cultured air, with arcaded streets, bicycles and squares made for long dinners.
Sabbioneta was built in the late sixteenth century by Vespasiano Gonzaga as a planned town: star-shaped walls, a grid of streets, a theatre, galleries and palaces, all designed to express Renaissance ideas about the perfect city. On a weekday it can be almost silent, which makes it rather wonderful.
The ride between the two crosses the Po plain, flat and fertile, with poplar plantations, rice fields, dykes and farmhouses. Straight roads, dusty in summer and shrouded in fog in winter, are punctuated by sharp corners at field boundaries. Mosquitoes can be fierce on summer evenings near the water. Mantua's centre has limited traffic zones, so park outside the core and walk. Fuel and food are easy in Mantua; for lunch, order tortelli di zucca, pasta filled with pumpkin, amaretti and mostarda, a sweet and savoury mix that sums up the city's character, or risotto alla pilota with sausage, from the rice country just outside the walls.