Villa Valmarana ai Nani Site Features

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.

Giambattista's Iliad room

The sacrifice of Iphigenia, with painted architecture opening the ceiling -- illusionism at the top of its form.

Giandomenico's Foresteria

Peasants at a meal, carnival crowds, a Chinese fantasy room. Painting about ordinary life, decades before that became normal.

The seventeen dwarves

Stone figures along the garden wall, and the source of the villa's name.

The walk to La Rotonda

A footpath through fields links the villa to Villa La Rotonda a few minutes away; the two are naturally visited together.

The villa sits on the slope of Monte Berico on the southern edge of Vicenza, with terraced gardens looking north over the city and the plain beyond. It is around twenty-five minutes on foot from the centre, much of it uphill, or a short ride on city bus 8.