How Vicenza Was Built and Changed Over Time

Palladio's buildings here are mostly brick rendered in stucco, tooled and painted to read as stone. That was not deception so much as economy: his clients were provincial gentry, not popes, and the system let a modest budget buy a Roman temple front.

The Basilica Palladiana is the clearest demonstration. A medieval town hall was structurally failing and out of square; Palladio wrapped it in a two-storey classical loggia whose repeating arch-and-column unit -- the serliana, now called the Palladian motif -- could absorb the irregular bay widths of the older building behind. A classical skin fitted to a crooked medieval box, and it works.

The Teatro Olimpico solved a different problem: how to build a Roman theatre indoors, in a small hall, out of wood and plaster. The permanent stage set behind the proscenium uses forced perspective so aggressively that its streets appear to recede for hundreds of metres in a space a few metres deep.

At La Rotonda, the logic goes the other way: a perfectly symmetrical house with four identical porticoes on a hilltop, designed around the view rather than around a road or a courtyard. It is less a farmhouse than an argument about geometry, and it is the single most copied private building in the world.