Villa Cornaro Site Features

The double portico is the point. Palladio had used temple fronts before, but here the loggia steps forward from the body of the house on both the entrance and the garden side, two orders high, giving a deep shaded porch on each face.

Eighteenth-century English architects working from Palladio's Quattro Libri took that arrangement almost literally, and it reached the American South by the same route — which is why a house on the Veneto plain is an ancestor of a great many porticoed façades a long way from it.

The front carries a two-storey projecting portico — Ionic below, Corinthian above — standing clear of the wall behind it. Palladio had used temple fronts before and would again, but a double loggia projecting from the façade like this was new, and it is the single reason the villa is cited as often as it is.

The idea travelled further than the building ever could. The Quattro Libri plates were studied by British architects and then by American ones, and the two-tier portico of the Anglo-American country house descends from designs like this one.

Inside, the main hall is a four-column room running the depth of the house, with Mariani's statues set against the walls — a Roman atrium reinterpreted as the social centre of a working estate.

Piombino Dese lies on the flat, intensively farmed plain between Padua and Treviso, cut by drainage channels and without any natural rise.

Palladio's villas on this ground were the centres of working agricultural estates, and the flatness is why the raised portico reads as it does — there is nothing else to give a building height or presence.