Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A public square in an Italian town.
  • noun A roofed and arcaded passageway; a colonnade.
  • noun New England & Southern Atlantic US A veranda.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An open square in a town surrounded by buildings or colonnades; a plaza: as, the piazza of Covent Garden; the Piazza del Popolo in Rome; the Piazza dell' Annunziata in Florence.
  • noun An arcaded or colonnaded walk upon the exterior of a building; a veranda; a gallery.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun An open square in a European town, especially an Italian town; hence (Arch.), an arcaded and roofed gallery; a portico. In the United States the word is popularly applied to a veranda.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A public square, especially in an Italian city.
  • noun dated A veranda.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a public square with room for pedestrians

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Italian, from Latin platēa, street, from Greek plateia (hodos), broad (way), feminine of platus, broad; see plat- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Italian piazza.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word piazza.

Examples

  • No one is sure why the term piazza survives here while vanishing most everywhere else, but

    Stories: Local News 2008

  • In the piazza is a stone monument dedicated to workers killed while building the Frejus rail tunnel linking Italy and France.

    USATODAY.com - Torino's magic not as simple as black, white 2006

  • The piazza is always dirty and noisy – that goes without saying – but on

    Jerry Junior 1907

  • "Why," she replied, "the rain has washed all the color out of our flags, and the piazza is covered with red and blue streams of water."

    Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897 1898

  • The thick curtain of the green vine that drapes the piazza is hung over its whole surface with the long drooping clusters of its starry flowers that lose all their sweetness upon the air, and show from the garden beneath like an immense airy veil of delicate white lace in the moonlight, -- a wonderful white glory.

    An Island Garden 1894

  • Next door and across the piazza is the 1983 museum, the last work of an enervated Stone, co-architect of the original 1939 Museum of Modern Art in New York.

    Easily Accessible Pleasures 2010

  • They passed Donatello and Leonardo, and up toward the far end of the entrance toward the piazza was the statue of Cosimo, looking very wise and surprisingly warm, standing alongside his grandson.

    The Poet Prince KATHLEEN MCGOWAN 2010

  • Standing in the 96-by-72-foot atrium (which Mr. Piano calls a piazza), one can also look into the park to the east and west, down long symmetrical wings 35 feet high.

    Piano's Forte: Museum as Ecosystem 2008

  • On the piazza is the shop of bookbinder Paolo Olbi, where you can find elegant hand-bound journals.

    Venice Crossings: A Traghetto Tour Reveals the City's Other Side 2008

  • The piazza is the terminus for Via del Corso, a popular shopping street that was also the main road leading into Rome from the north in antiquity, but it is also flanked by a fifteenth-century palace, the Palazzo Venezia, built by a Venetian Cardinal and many centuries later occupied by Mussolini, as well as a church, San Marco, that was founded in the fourth century AD.

    Rome With A View at eternallycool.net 2007

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.