Venetian Villas
Holidays among architecture and Palladio

When we talk about Venetian Villas, we think of particular types of buildings that are unique in architecture's history. The Venetian Villas have had special success. The success is due to the large number of Villas and to a great variety of types, because the Venetian Villas have been often copied, in particular in
England and the U.S.A. The success, however, is due especially to the fame of some Venetian artists and writers who have enhanced their beauty, besides
architects and painters.

The centre of this phenomenon, started in 16th century, under the domination of the Venetian Republic, it's not the result of the genial idea of a single artist but the product of different elements. A small group of land-owners paid architects and artists in order to create a new style, a new building, and therefore a new culture called "The culture of the Venetian Villas" as LA CIVILTA' DELLE VILLE VENETE in Italian. It's right to think that these villas have been built in peacetime, the best political and social situation. After the war against Cambrai's League, Serenissima Venetian Republic changed its interests to the art of preservation and to stability.

The origin of Venetian Villas Culture is connected on the one hand with the idea of Villa in the ancient Roma, largely expressed in books, and on the other hand with the 16th century economic and political forces that urged the Venetian Patriarchate to improve the use of lands with reclamation and exploitation. So the Venetian Villa becomes the Villa for antonomasia.
The Venetian Villa with its loggias, rooms, and open galleries integrates the inner part of the building with the outside, with the landscape as synthesis of the human ambition to live close to nature. Among all the villas, the most famous is certainly Villa Capra known as "La Rotonda". It's Palladio's greatest masterpiece, which has become a symbol of the villas of the Veneto region and the cultural matrix that produced them. Cardinal Paolo Almerico, who tired of the ostentation and internecine struggles of the Curia, retired to his native Vicenza to spend the last years of his life in peace. (M.MURARO: meeting Herziana library 1963-Roma)

 
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