Vicenza, a city in northern Italy, is the capital of the eponymous province in the Veneto region, at the northern base of the Monte Berico, straddling the Bacchiglione. Vicenza is approximately 60 km west of Venice and 200 km east of Milan. As of 2007, Vicenza had an estimated population of 119,038. Vicenza is the third-largest Italian industrial city as measured by the value of its exports.
Vicentia was settled by the Italic Euganei tribe and then by the Paleo-Veneti tribe in the third and second centuries BCE, from whom it was taken by the Gauls. The Romans conquered it from the Gauls in 157 BCE and gave the city the name of Vicetia or Vincentia, meaning "victorious".
The population of Vicentia received Roman citizenship in 49 BCE. The city had some importance as a way-station on the important road from Mediolanum (Milan) to Aquileia, near Tergeste (Trieste), but it was overshadowed by its neighbor Patavium (Padua). Little survives of the Roman city, but three of the bridges across the Bacchiglione and Retrone rivers are of Roman origin, and isolated arches of a Roman aqueduct exist outside the Porta Santa Croce.
During the decline of the Western Roman Empire, Heruls, Vandals, Alaric and his Visigoths, as well as the Huns laid waste to the area, but the city recovered after the Ostrogoth conquest in 489 CE. It was also an important Lombard city and then a Frankish centre. Numerous Benedictine monasteries were built in the Vicenza area, beginning in the sixth century.
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