Verona Day Trip No. 1: The architectural delights of Vicenza

You are unlikely to have heard of Vicenza, or to have any reason to visit, unless you are a devotee of the history of Western architecture. In that case, this is sacred ground. The town’s most famous son was Andrea Palladio, the man who almost single-handedly created and defined the neo-classicism that went on to dominate everything from the English country house to global government buildings to modern housing estates and offices. 

Vicenza is architecture ground zero, filled with famous buildings Palladio designed.

We started in Vicenza’s main square, dominated by the Basilica Palladiana. Palladio won a contest to restore a crumbling gothic town hall and came up with a radical solution to skin the whole thing with a new exterior. Pristine white marble instead of red brick. Round arches and the clean lines of classical columns rather than pointed arches and fiddly minarets. A progression of those round arches is flanked by rectangular openings on each side … what came to be called a Palladian window. Repeated, these form an arcade on the ground floor and a loggia above. Scores of different offices and shops could be housed inside, but they’d all be unified by this elegant exterior that made the whole thing look like Ancient Rome come back to life. Heroic classical statues stand along the roofline, as if Olympian spectators are viewing life in the city below. It is a beguilingly beautiful construction.

A short walk away is a building that would be as influential on the architecture of entertainment as the Basilica was on government. The Teatro Olimpico was the first indoor theatre built in the Renaissance and arguably the first purpose-built one since classical times. Theatre had been an integral part of the cultural life of Greece and Rome, performed in grand, dedicated spaces. After the collapse of empire it devolved to religious plays put on in the street or churches, or small performances in rulers' homes. The Teatro Olimpico was a return to the grandeur of the past. 

Palladio built a three-level classical screen behind the stage, re-creating exactly what you would have seen in the great theatres of Greece and Rome. And the ruins of which tourists still flock to see in places like Athens, Taormina or Jerash (Jordan). The semi-circular seating area is pulled right from those models as well, with an impressive colonnade topped with statuary ringing the back. While those ancient theatres were open air, the great Palladian innovation was building the whole thing inside, with a roof painted to look like the sky. 

Three arches in the screen behind the stage show off scenery that plays tricks with perspective, with city streets seeming to dwindle to a distant vanishing point even though it’s actually only a few feet deep.  Outside the theatre space there are a couple of grand, frescoed rooms for attendees to mix and mingle; clearly the fore-runner of the bars ready to serve up interval drinks. The elegance and sophistication of this space is breath-taking, as is the realisation that it’s still fit for theatrical purpose more than 500 years after its construction. It’s even more impressive when you consider that London, with its outsized influence on the history of European drama, didn’t have its first purpose-built theatre for almost 100 years after the Olimpico opened, and it would be longer before a British theatre got a roof.

My passion for Palladio started not with government buildings or theaters but with the English country house, and it was our jaunt to the Villa Rotonda that really made my day. About a mile and a half outside of town, perched on a hill overlooking the river Bacchiglione and gentle agricultural lands, this rigorously symmetrical country house became the model for countless buildings around the world. 18th century English aristocrats became particularly obsessed: Chiswick House, just outside London, and the Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard are almost direct copies, and indirect influence is obvious up and down the country. After three decades of serious English country house exploration, it was so exciting to finally be here.

The building is a gem set within its landscape. From the distance it appears more of a lost, perfectly preserved temple than a house. The entry is one of ceremonial grandeur, up a sunken avenue of roses, then the path divides in two around a perfect oval of manicured lawn before imposing steps rise between guardian statues to a portico beneath an austere pediment held aloft by six elegant ionic columns. A dome rises behind. What's distinctive about the Villa Rotonda is that this is the facade on all four sides. Each portico has a central door opening into a rectangular hall that leads to a round, double-height room beneath the dome. In between the entrance halls are living rooms in each corner, while four circular stairs off the rotonda lead to rooms upstairs. (Presumably bedrooms, through you don't get to see these.)

The tile and marble floors, the high ceilings and the cross-breezes that come through if you open all the doors create perfect natural air conditioning. It was blazing outside, but the interiors were deliciously cool. Exactly the retreat from the baking cities that rich Italian landowners were after. The irony is that the English fell for a style that is fundamentally opposed to their climate. A bit like modern London restaurants trying to create cozy alfresco dining areas when they need heaters most of the year and traffic is whizzing by just a meter away, Palladian architecture in England was all about conjuring memories of happy, sunny places visited on special holidays. Despite the challenges of heating them, the neo-classical mansion set in a carefully-designed pastoral idyll was repeated so many times that people think of it as fundamentally English. But it all started in Vicenza.

Bluntly, there's not that much to see at Villa Rotonda and if you don't have that context in mind it might even be a bit underwhelming. But it's a lovely place and worth lingering. There are some pretty gardens around the house, benches beneath shaded porticos and places to spread out on the lawn beneath the trees. Some in our party read. Some sketched. We made an afternoon of it. If you wander this way, you'll get the greatest enjoyment by doing the same. 

Do check opening times. Unlike the many Palladian buildings in the town centre you can look at from the outside 24/7, the Villa is usually closed for several hours for lunch. Plan accordingly, as it's on a country lane and there is nothing close by in which to while away your time.