IN THE VENETO
- A comprehensive survey of the best of Palladio’s villas, major and minor.
- Stays throughout in Vicenza, Palladio’s home town where he built many palaces.
- Intensive but very rewarding, an itinerary not possible for independent travellers.
Utility is the key to understanding Palladio’s villas. In sixteenth-century Italy a villa was a farm, and in The Veneto agriculture had become a serious business for the city-based mercantile aristocracy as the Venetian maritime empire gradually crumbled before the advancing Ottoman Turks.
But beauty was equally the determinant of form, though beauty of a special kind. Palladio was designing buildings for a clientele who, whether princes of commerce, traditional soldier-aristocrats or gentlemen of leisure, shared an intense admiration for ancient Rome. They were children of the High Renaissance and steeped in humanist learning. Palladio was the first architect to regularly apply the colonnaded temple fronts to secular buildings.
But the beauty of his villas was not solely a matter of applied ornament. As can be seen particularly in his low-budget, pared-down villas and auxiliary buildings there is a geometric order which arises from sophisticated systems of proportion and an unerring intuitive sense of design. It is little wonder that Andrea Palladio became the most influential architect in the western world.
Most of his finest surviving villas and palaces are included on this tour, as well as some of the lesser-known and less accessible ones. The tour also presents a broader picture of the development of the Renaissance villa with examples from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries – the earliest unfortified country mansions, pre-Palladian humanist retreats and later elaborations on the Palladian theme.