Vicenza historical timeline

Origins

Vicetia was founded as a Roman municipium on the road between Verona and Padua, of moderate size and no great consequence. Fragments of it survive under the modern centre, including the cryptoporticus of a Roman house beneath Piazza Duomo.

Turning points

Vicenza submitted to Venice in 1404 and remained Venetian until 1797. That long stability, combined with the wealth of local landowning families who wanted to advertise it, produced the demand that Palladio spent his career meeting.

Influential people

Andrea di Pietro della Gondola arrived from Padua as a teenage stonemason in 1524. The humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino took him up, renamed him Palladio, and sent him to Rome to study ancient buildings first-hand. From 1549, when he won the commission to wrap the collapsing medieval town hall in a classical loggia, he effectively rebuilt the public face of the city -- and in 1570 published I quattro libri dell'architettura, which carried his ideas everywhere.

Cultural evolution

His influence travelled further than he did. Inigo Jones brought it to England, from where it reached the American colonies; Thomas Jefferson designed Monticello and the University of Virginia out of Palladio's books. More neoclassical public buildings descend from this small Italian city than from any other single source.

Present-day significance

Allied bombing in 1944 gutted the Basilica Palladiana and destroyed much of the centre; the rebuilding was careful and is now largely invisible. UNESCO inscribed the city in 1994, extending the listing in 1996 to the Palladian villas across the wider Veneto.