Europe squared

Have you ever paused to consider just what an amiable invention the town square is?

We happen to be great fans of the piazzas that serve as the natural focal points of many European towns and cities. At their best, such squares are an architectural gesture to conviviality. Some, such as Venice’s Piazza San Marco and Kraków’s Rynek Glowny are celebrated as key stages on the global tourist circuit. Napoléon may have judged St Marks to be le plus élégant salon d’Europe, but we have to say that nowadays it is a bit too bustling for our taste.

Our favourites are those city squares which remain integral to the everyday life of local communities – spaces which have not been so totally surrendered to tourists.

We have travelled hither and thither across Europe in search of the perfect town square. We’ve lingered in the Grand Place in Brussels, shivered in Stockholm’s Stortorget and braved the traffic in Lisbon’s Rossio. Our shortlist of favourite European squares would surely include the Mirové námestí in Litomerice (Czech Republic) though we concede it is a bit too vast to be really comfortable. Then there is the Piazza Vecchia in Bergamo, which is so impossibly beautiful that we wondered if we had died and gone to Heaven. There is surely no more desirable place on this planet for a tongue-tingling grappa late on a summer evening. Then there is the Untermarkt in the eastern German town of Görlitz – picture perfect, to be sure, but perhaps too much like a museum.

But for us the real coup de théâtre in the European town square stakes is the marketplace in Zamosc in eastern Poland. To see some pictures of Zamosc's town square please click here. It is a modest affair, just a hundred metres across, but a delicate essay in urban perfection. A stunning renaissance town hall, some richly ornamented Armenian merchants’ houses, Italianate colonnades and a happy mixture of quite ordinary shops. Zamosc, in our book at least, really takes some beating.

This is the second in a series of occasional posts by Susanne Kries and Nicky Gardner of hidden europe magazine.