Villa Pisani at Montagnana Historical Timeline

Francesco Pisani, of the Venetian patrician family, commissioned the villa around 1552 and died in 1567, before the interior was finished. Palladio was in his forties and had already built in Vicenza; this is early work, and he thought well enough of it to publish the plates in the Quattro Libri dell'Architettura of 1570.

What it is not is a farm. Palladio's villas were normally the working centre of an agricultural estate, with barns and granaries attached to the house. This one stands immediately outside a town gate, on a plot with no land to work and no agricultural buildings at all — a nobleman's town house given the form of a villa. That is why it looks compressed beside its rural relatives, and it is the most interesting thing about it.

It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996, when the existing listing for the city of Vicenza was extended to take in Palladio's villas across the Veneto.