The allure of Vicenza
Escape Venice’s tourist crush with a trip to this nearby city, home of great Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio
VICENZA, ITALY — If you want to break away from the crowds that make Venice a poster child for the term “overtourism” and you love architecture, there is one place you must go: nearby Vicenza, a showcase for the work of the renowned Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.
Palladio, who lived from 1508 to 1580, drew inspiration from the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome, transforming these models into masterpieces that influenced everything from English country houses to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
The most famous of his works, the transcendent hilltop mansion called the Villa Rotonda, is a short taxi, bus or bike ride from Vicenza’s compact, largely car-free town center, where the main street bears Palladio’s name.
The town center itself is stocked with impressive Palladio buildings, including numerous town palaces, or palazzi, one of which houses an excellent museum devoted entirely to the architect.
In the surrounding countryside are Palladio’s villas, where the architect combined opulent living quarters and working farm buildings into coherent complexes that married nature with culture, rusticity and urbanity.
Forty-seven buildings by Palladio, built in and around Vicenza, are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Those headed to next year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, May 23 to Nov. 29, should plan a visit.
Located about 40 miles west of Venice, with a population of about 112,000, Vicenza (pronounced viCHEN-zah) is an ideal day trip. I took a red, sleeknosed Italo train from Venice’s Santa Lucia station. (Round-trip fare was just under 38 euros, or roughly $42. The trip, one-way, took 39 minutes.)
Vicenza once was part of the far-flung Venetian empire, a status still signaled by a pair of towering classical columns that frame an entry to its main square. One is topped by the ubiquitous symbol of Venice, the winged lion.
But Palladio’s buildings gave Vicenza a distinct identity. They were classical, weighty and vigorously three-dimensional — and, thus, recognizably different from the delicate, highly decorated Gothic facades that line Venice’s canals.
Along Vicenza’s main square, for example, is an imposing public building, the Palladian Basilica, that the architect redesigned in the mid-16th century after a portion of the original Gothic exterior collapsed. Palladio, then just 38 years old and a relative unknown, wrapped the building in a two-level stack of exterior passageways, or loggias. Their arched openings and white marble possess the sculptural power and depth of Roman architecture. And God is in the details.
Like an accordion, the rectangular openings on either side of each arch vary in width, an “elastic” solution that accommodates the original building’s uneven dimensions.
A good place to take it all in is a small adjacent plaza named for Palladio and adorned with a statue of the bearded architect as well as likenesses of architectural tools and bits of classical decoration.
The town center offers numerous other opportunities to see Palladio’s genius.
Assorted palazzi reveal the skill with which the architect manipulated the classical orders — Doric, Ionic and Corinthian — to make individual statements for each of his wealthy clients. Palladio also designed