The Palazzo Civico.

The Palazzo Civico was built around 1866 to give the municipal archive and council meetings a home at last: until then they had been held in private houses and in the buildings looking onto the piazza Grande, today Piazza del Popolo. A few “hovels” stood on the site and were pulled down for the purpose; the square’s clock was moved onto the little tower of the building.

A building nobody liked

The building, irregular in plan, was not to everyone’s liking. A comment from the time even describes it as:

that mass of materials which we cannot tell what geometric figure it belongs to, with few rooms, all more or less out of square, and for the rest passageways, doors, little windows, windows and great windows, and on top of that a dangerous spiral staircase to reach them.

The choice of position condemned the town to that “bottleneck” which in those days prevented air from circulating in the square and which still today hinders the passage of vehicles. Restoration work was carried out in 1993.

Today

The building is the seat of the Municipality of Riparbella. On the ground floor are the offices and the Pro Loco tourist information point, where you can pick up the map of the murals and information about the trails.