Amid the elegant noble buildings in characteristically Venetian style that can be admired in Trento, the austere facade of Palazzo Thun is particularly outstanding. Now home to the City Hall, for centuries – from the second half of the 15th century until 1873 – it was the private residence of the noble Thun family.
The earliest documents that mention the building refer to the grouping together, during the 15th century, of a number of medieval houses that had been purchased by the counts of Thun, a long-established noble family from the Val di Non.
Later, in the 16th century, Sigismondo Thun had some major improvement work carried out, which involved extending the building on both sides and giving it its present-day appearance. The division of the facade into four rows of windows also dates to this period; the original facade must have featured windows with pointed arches, as was indicated by the traces identified during the restoration work carried out in 1997. Another discovery made on this occasion was the mock ashlar pictorial decoration that today is a notable feature of the building; this distinctive technique imitates a kind of wall covering formed by overlaying stones.
Also present on the facade is the coat of arms of the Thun family, which you can see both on the ledges and on the sixteenth-century keystone.
The last important architectural renovation work dates to the 1830s, and was carried out on the orders of Count Matteo Thun. The work involved the repair of the large colonnaded courtyard, the only one open to visitors today, and the renovation of numerous rooms now occupied by local council offices.
Let me leave you with an interesting fact: the rich family of the counts of Thun, originally called Tono, owned three magnificent castles in the Val di Non, which are now open to visitors: Thun Castle, Bragher Castle and Castelfondo Castle. The most prestigious is the first of the three, where an important member of the family, Sigismondo Thun, nicknamed “the orator”, sadly lost his life in a fire in 1569.
During the Council of Trent, Sigismondo was ambassador to the Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I.
