Palazzo Comunale (Modena)

Located right behind the Duomo, on Piazza Grande. Although the façade is early 1600s, it conceals a complex of no less than ten buildings behind it, the oldest of which, the Palazzo Urbis Mutinae, goes back to 1046. The clock tower was adapted in the late 15th century from a much older tower.

A rather mysterious 12th or 13th-century statue of a woman known as La Bonissima (‘the super good’) who according to legend was a rich woman who distributed money during a plague and famine, or else Countess Matilda of Tuscany who helped to settle a dispute over the translation of St Geminiano’s body in 1106. More prosaically she stands atop a stone engraved with the measures that should be used in the market which used to take place in the square.

Inside the Palazzo Comunale

Besides the sacred Bucket, kept in the Camerino dei Confirmati, you can see a painting by Bartolomeo Schedoni, the Sposalizio della Vergine, in the same chamber, and in the Sala del Consiglio Vecchio a set of peculiar paintings by Schedoni and Ercole dell’Abate on the theme of patriotism and government.