Villa Pisani at Montagnana site features

The front toward the town carries two superimposed orders in half-columns, Doric below and Ionic above — a Roman idea applied to a house, and a device Palladio used throughout his career.

The two faces of the building are deliberately unalike. The town side is the formal one, composed to be read by someone coming out through Porta Padova; the side toward open country is plainer. Seeing both takes two minutes and explains the plan better than the façade alone does.

The scale is worth noticing precisely because it is modest. Set against the vast eighteenth-century Pisani palace at Stra, built by a later generation of the same family, this is the earlier and more disciplined idea of what a villa was for.