Why is the asolo italy tour magnificent?”
ASOLO, Italy — If Americans have heard the proper noun Asolo, they think of it as an Italian brand of athletic shoes and mountaineering boots. Veteran travelers in northern Italy know better. Asolo, as I discovered with my wife, Rosalie, during a weeklong visit in early July, is a small, heavenly Italian hill town (population, 1,500). It perches above wooded slopes on the edge of the agricultural and industrial plain, or pianura, which extends north and west from Venice and the Adriatic Sea to the foothills of the Dolomites, the towering limestone peaks that form the eastern buttress of the Italian Alps. Beloved by the English poet Robert Browning and the early-20th-century travel writer Freya Stark, Asolo has superb restaurants, arcaded streets lined with shops, great bars and sidewalk cafes, a lively main piazza and a beautiful church installed with religious paintings by the important Renaissance artists Lorenzo Lotto and Jacopo Bassano. For lovers of Renaissance architecture, Asolo
