Discover Villa Valmarana ai Nani

The buildings themselves are deliberately unremarkable: plain plastered walls, simple proportions, nothing that would detain an architectural historian for long. That is worth knowing before arriving, because the contrast is the point -- this is not a Palladian showpiece but an ordinary house carrying extraordinary painting.

The Palazzina, the main house, has seven frescoed rooms by Giambattista, each given over to a single literary source and each treated as an architectural illusion: painted colonnades and skies that extend the small rooms outward.

The Foresteria, the guest wing, is Giandomenico's, and its rooms are lower, lighter and full of people rather than gods. The Chinese room and the carnival room are the ones people remember.

Along the garden wall stand the seventeen stone dwarves that give the villa its name.