Zamość is a town that was designed on a drawing board, and it shows. In 1580 the chancellor Jan Zamoyski, one of the richest men in Poland, hired an Italian architect from Padua, Bernardo Morando, to build an ideal Renaissance city on his own estate. The plan was strict and elegant, with a central square, a regular grid of streets, a palace, a cathedral, an academy and a ring of bastioned fortifications, and the town was meant to be a trading centre on the road between Lublin and Lviv. People called it the Padua of the North, and it was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1992.
The Great Market Square is the heart. It is exactly one hundred metres on each side, framed by arcaded merchants' houses in pastel colours, with a tall town hall on the north side and a double flight of curved stairs added in the eighteenth century. Armenian merchants settled here in the early years and built their own houses on the square with decorated attics, and their family arms and ornate parapets give the arcades their individual character. The cathedral, a short walk away, holds the Zamoyski tombs, and the fortifications, though partly rebuilt after the Russian army took them down in the nineteenth century, still enclose the old town.
The ride in is straightforward. Zamość lies on the Roztocze, a ridge of low forested hills in south-east Poland, and the roads from the north and south run through rolling farmland, beech and pine woods, and small villages with wooden houses. The surface is generally good, although some minor roads are patchy, and the traffic is moderate. The Roztocze National Park, a short ride to the south, has forests of fir and beech, and a herd of Polish konik horses, a small hardy breed descended from wild tarpans.
Zamość is a city of about sixty-six thousand people, so fuel and meals are easy to find. Park outside the old town, and walk in through the gates. On a warm evening the square fills with tables and the colours of the facades glow in the last light. Try pierogi, a bowl of hot barszcz, or a local beer, and give yourself time to circle the square slowly, looking up.