Villa La Rotonda Site Features

The plan is a circle inside a square, with four identical projecting porticoes on the axes -- the only Palladian villa built with all four. Each portico carries six Ionic columns and a pediment, reached by a broad flight of steps.

The reason for the symmetry is the site. The villa sits on a knoll with open country in every direction, so there is no principal view to face and no road frontage to address: every side is the front. Palladio wrote that he gave it loggias on all four sides precisely because all four aspects deserved one.

Inside, the four entrances converge on a central circular hall rising the full height into a dome, frescoed in trompe-l'oeil to dissolve the ceiling into sky. The temple front applied to a house was, in the 1560s, a genuine provocation: it borrowed the language of the sacred for domestic use, and every neoclassical mansion since has followed.

Four identical fronts

Walk the full circuit of the exterior. The building presents the same face in every direction, which is disorientating in a way photographs never convey.

The domed hall

The circular central room, frescoed by Alessandro Maganza and others, with the dome opening into painted sky.

The view out

From any of the four porticoes the Veneto plain and the Colli Berici lie open. The house was designed around this and it still works.

The descendants

Chiswick House, Monticello, the Villa Foscari lineage -- once you have seen this, you begin recognising it everywhere.

La Rotonda sits on a low hill on the southern edge of Vicenza, about twenty-five minutes' walk from the centre and a few minutes from Villa Valmarana ai Nani. A footpath connects the two through the fields, which is the best way to see either.

The setting is still largely agricultural, and the hill still stands clear of the city -- rare enough for a villa this close to a town, and essential to the design.