Sabbioneta is a Renaissance experiment: a whole town built from scratch in the second half of the sixteenth century by Vespasiano Gonzaga, a soldier, scholar and minor prince of the great Mantuan family, who wanted a capital laid out according to the ideals of the age. He got it. Inside its star-shaped walls the streets run in a regular grid, and in a few hundred metres you pass a ducal palace, a long gallery built to show off his collection of ancient sculpture, a summer palace, and one of the earliest purpose-built theatres in Europe, the Teatro all'Antica, designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi. Sabbioneta and Mantua were listed together by UNESCO in 2008 as two contrasting visions of the Renaissance city.
When Vespasiano died in 1591 without a male heir, his town lost its reason to exist and simply stopped. That is why it survives so completely, a tiny place of fifteen hundred people inside walls built for a court. Walking through it on a weekday afternoon can feel eerily like walking onto an empty stage set.
The landscape is the lower Po plain, flat as a billiard table, cut into fields of maize, tomatoes and poplar plantations, with irrigation canals everywhere and the great river itself just to the south. The riding is straight and easy, on roads lined with plane trees or running along the top of embankments, and in summer the heat can be oppressive and the mosquitoes ferocious near the water. In autumn and winter thick fog settles over the plain, sometimes for days, which makes riding genuinely dangerous; if the forecast says nebbia, believe it.
Casalmaggiore, six kilometres away on the Po, is the nearest town with a decent choice of fuel stations, shops and places to eat; Sabbioneta itself has a few cafes and trattorias. This is good food country. Try tortelli di zucca, pumpkin-filled pasta with a hint of mostarda and amaretti, and the cured meats of the area, culatello and salame, with a glass of chilled Lambrusco from just across the river in Emilia. Then ride along the embankment at sunset, when the poplars throw long shadows across the fields.