Palladian Villas of the Veneto

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The Palladian Villas of Veneto are villas designed by architect Andrea Palladio, all of whose buildings were erected in Veneto, the mainland region then under the political control of the Venetian Republic. The villas are protected by UNESCO as part of a World Heritage Site named City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto. UNESCO inscribed the site on the World Heritage List in 1994.
At first the site was called “Vicenza, City of Palladio” and only buildings in the immediate area of Vicenza were included. Various types of buildings were represented in the original site, which included the Teatro Olimpico, palazzi and a few villas. However, most of Palladio’s surviving villas lay outside the site. In 1996 the site was expanded. Its present name reflects the fact that it includes villas designed by Palladio throughout Veneto.
The term villa was used to describe a country house. Often rich families in the Veneto also had a house in town called a palazzo. In most cases the owners named their palazzi and villas with the family surname, hence there is both a Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza and a Villa Chiericati in the countryside, similarly there is a Palazzo Foscari in Venice and a Villa Foscari in the countryside. Somewhat confusingly there are multiple Villas Pisani, including two by Palladio.
By 1550 Palladio had produced a whole group of villas, whose scale and decoration can be seen as closely matching the wealth and social standing of the owners: the powerful and very rich Pisani, bankers and Venetian patricians, had huge vaults and a loggia façade realised with stone piers and rusticated Doric pilasters; the (briefly) wealthy minor noble and salt-tax farmer Taddeo Gazzotto in his villa at Bertesina, had pilasters executed in brick, though the capitals and bases were carved in stone; Biagio Saraceno at Finale had a loggia with three arched bays, but without any architectural order.
In the villa Saraceno as in the villa Poiana Palladio was able to give presence and dignity to an exterior simply by the placing and orchestration of windows, pediments, loggia arcades: his less wealthy patrons must have appreciated the possibility of being able to enjoy impressive buildings without having to spend much on stone and stone carving. Palladio’s villas – that is the houses of estate owners – met a need for a new type of country residence.
His designs implicitly recognise that it was not necessary to have a great palace in the countryside, modelled directly on city palaces, as many late fifteenth-century villas (like the huge villa da Porto at Thiene) in fact are. Something smaller, often with only one main living floor was adequate as a centre for controlling the productive activity from which much of the owner’s income probably derived and for impressing tenants and neighbours as well as entertaining important guests.
Palladio in his designs sought to co-ordinate all these varied elements, which in earlier complexes had usually found their place not on the basis of considerations of symmetry vista and architectural hierarchy but of the shape of the available area, usually defined by roads and water courses. Orientation was also important: Palladio states in the Quattro Libri that barns should face south so as to keep the hay dry, thus preventing it from fermenting and burning.

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