Discover Basilica Palladiana

A medieval town hall wrapped in a white marble screen: two tiers of arches run the whole way round the older brick building, each arch framing a smaller round-headed opening between paired columns, so the façade reads as a rhythm of holes rather than a wall. Above it sits a vast copper roof shaped like an upturned hull, and a loggia at the top gives out over the Piazza dei Signori.

The problem Palladio was given was geometric, not aesthetic. The medieval hall behind was irregular -- its bays were of unequal width and not square to each other -- so any regular colonnade wrapped around it would visibly fail to line up.

His solution was the serliana: an arch carried on two small columns, flanked on each side by a flat-topped opening. The arch stays a fixed size while the flanking gaps stretch or shrink, so the module can absorb bays of different widths while reading as a perfectly regular rhythm. Nobody notices the irregularity, which is the entire achievement. The motif has been called the Palladian window ever since.

The loggia runs two storeys -- Doric below, Ionic above -- in white Piovene stone, and is structurally independent of the building it surrounds. It braces the old hall as well as dressing it.