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piazza

(pē-ăz'ə, -ä'zə) pronunciation

n., pl. -zas.

pl. pi·az·ze (pē-ät'sə, pyät'sĕ). (also pē-ät'sə, pyät'sä) A public square in an Italian town.
A roofed and arcaded passageway; a colonnade.
New England & Southern Atlantic U.S. A veranda.

[Italian, from Latin platēa, street, from Greek plateia (hodos), broad (way), feminine of platus, broad.]

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: piazza

Open square or marketplace, surrounded by buildings, in an Italian town or city. It was equivalent to the plaza of Spanish-speaking countries. The term became more widely used in the 16th – 18th century, denoting any large open space with buildings around it. In 17th – 18th-century Britain, long covered walks or galleries with roofs supported by columns were called piazzas; in the U.S. in the 19th century, piazza was another name for a veranda formed by projecting eaves.

For more information on piazza, visit Britannica.com.

Architecture: piazza

1. A public open space or square surrounded by buildings.
2. A term occasionally used for a raised porch or veranda in French Vernacular architecture or in American Colonial architecture and derivatives (especially in the South); often supported by columns or posts.

Fine Arts Dictionary: piazza

(pee-az-uh, pee-ah-zuh, pee-aht-suh)

An open square, especially in a city or town in Italy.

Wikipedia: piazza

For the Brazilian footballer, see Wilson da Silva Piazza

For the American baseball player, see Mike Piazza

For the coupé car, see Isuzu Piazza

Piazza Navona and the Fontana (fountain) del Moro in central Rome, Italy. The other fountain (in the background, surrounded by scaffolding) is Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi.

A piazza (IPA /'pjatsa/) (also pronounced: pe-at-sa) is an open square in a city, found in Italy, and also in some other places on the Dalmatian coast and in surrounding regions. The term is roughly equivalent to the Spanish plaza. In Ethiopia, it is used to refer to a part of a city.

When the Earl of Bedford developed the first privately-ventured public square built in London, Covent Garden, his architect Inigo Jones surrounded it with arcades, in the Italian fashion. Talk about the piazza was connected in Londoners' minds, not with the square as a whole but with the arcades, which were called the "piazzas".

In Britain piazza now generally refers to a paved open pedestrian space, without grass or planting, often in front of a significant building or shops.

In the United States, in the early 19th century, a piazza by further extension became a fanciful name for a colonnaded porch. Yet, the word piazza was used by some, especially in the Boston area, to refer to a front porch, fanciful or otherwise, connected to a house or apartment.^[1]

Piazza is also a common last name for Italians and Italian-Americans. The name grew out of the region surrounding Venice, and large populations of Piazza reside in Calabria, Sicily, and Venice.

References

^ Boston University, "Boston English"

		Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
		Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		Architecture. McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction. Copyright © 2003 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		Fine Arts Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Piazza". Read more
		Translations. Copyright © 2007, WizCom Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved. Read more

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