City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto

Stand still for a moment and listen. Footsteps echo under stone arches. A café spoon taps against a cup. The light here is soft and pale, and it falls across columns the colour of old cream. You are in Vicenza, a city in northern Italy that one man shaped more than any other. His name was Andrea Palladio. Almost everything you will see today carries his ideas about order, proportion and calm.

Palladio was not born with that name. He was born in Padua in 1508, the son of a modest family, and he trained as a stonecutter. He worked with his hands long before he worked with drawings. In Vicenza, a wealthy scholar and poet named Gian Giorgio Trissino noticed his talent. Trissino took him into his circle, taught him about the classical world, and gave him a new name. Palladio comes from Pallas, an ancient name for Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom.

Trissino also took the young man to Rome. There, Palladio measured and sketched the ruins of ancient temples, baths and theatres. He studied how the Romans used columns, steps and symmetry. He did not want to copy them. He wanted to understand the rules behind their beauty. When he came back to Vicenza, he carried those rules with him. Over the next decades, he turned this provincial city into a kind of open-air classroom of architecture.

The best place to see his first great success is the main square, Piazza dei Signori. Look for the large building with two levels of white arches and a green roof shaped like the hull of an upturned ship. This is the Basilica Palladiana. The name is a little misleading. It was never a church. In Roman times, a basilica was a public hall for law and trade, and that is what this building was.

Here is the first surprise. Palladio did not design the hall itself. The older Gothic hall, the Palazzo della Ragione, already stood here. Its outer arcades had collapsed, and the city held a competition to rebuild them. Palladio won in the late 1540s. He wrapped the old building in a new skin of stone loggias, which are open galleries with arches. The work took decades and was finished after his death.

Look closely at the arches. Each one has a tall central opening with a round top, and two narrower rectangular openings on either side, framed by small columns. This pattern became known around the world as the Palladian window. You may have seen it in country houses in England or in public buildings in America. Here it solved a practical problem. It let Palladio fit regular arches onto an older, uneven structure without anyone noticing.

Now walk along Corso Andrea Palladio, the long main street of the old town. Look up at the palaces on both sides. Several were designed by Palladio or by architects who followed him. And here is the second surprise. Many of these grand columns are not solid marble. Palladio often built with brick and then covered it with stucco, a kind of plaster, finished to look like stone. It was cheaper, faster and, for his clients, perfectly convincing.

At the eastern end of the old town is Palladio's last work, the Teatro Olimpico. He began it in 1580, the year he died, and his follower Vincenzo Scamozzi completed it. It opened in 1585 with a performance of Oedipus Rex, the ancient Greek tragedy. It is often described as the oldest surviving indoor theatre in the world with its original stage set. The building belonged to a local academy of scholars and nobles who loved classical culture.

Inside, the seats rise in a curved wooden semicircle, like a small Roman theatre. But the real wonder is the stage. Behind the tall stone front, Scamozzi built streets that seem to run far into the distance. They represent the city of Thebes. The streets are actually quite short. The floors slope upward and the buildings shrink as they go back, which tricks the eye into seeing depth. It is a theatre set that has stayed in place for more than four centuries.

The story of Palladio does not end at the city walls. The UNESCO World Heritage listing first covered the city of Vicenza, and later it was extended to include his villas across the Veneto countryside. These were country houses for wealthy families from Venice and Vicenza. At the time, Venice was turning away from the sea and investing in farmland. Palladio designed homes that were also working farms, with wings for storage, stables and workers.

The most famous of them stands on a gentle hill just outside the city. It is called Villa Almerico Capra, but almost everyone knows it as La Rotonda. Picture a square house with a dome at its centre, and an identical temple-like porch with columns and steps on each of its four sides. From every direction, it looks the same. Each porch looks out over a different view of the hills and fields. It is less a house than an idea about balance.

Further afield, other villas show different sides of his work. Villa Barbaro at Maser has rooms covered in frescoes by the painter Paolo Veronese, with painted doors, painted servants and painted views that play with what is real. Villa Foscari, near the Brenta canal, rises above the water like a temple. Palladio also wrote a treatise, The Four Books of Architecture, published in 1570. Through that book, his ideas travelled to England, to Russia and to the young United States, where Thomas Jefferson studied it closely.

If you have time, climb or drive up to the sanctuary on Monte Berico, the hill just south of the centre. From the terrace, the whole city spreads out below you. You can pick out the green roof of the Basilica, the towers, the red tiles and the mountains in the distance. It is the easiest way to understand how compact this city is, and how many ideas came out of such a small place.

Now look around you once more. Notice the rhythm of the columns, the way the arches repeat, the quiet spacing between windows. None of it is accidental. A stonecutter from Padua decided that buildings should feel calm and human in scale, and this city listened. As you walk on, look up from time to time. You will start to see his patterns everywhere... in a doorway, a window, a line of steps leading somewhere new.