Villa Pisani at Stra Site Features

The villa is Baroque rather than Palladian, and the difference is the point: where a Palladian villa is compact and templed, this is a long, tall palace front of enormous width, meant to overwhelm.

The garden facade is the show front, with a giant order of columns and a crowded skyline of statues.

Inside, the ballroom rises through two storeys, and its ceiling carries Tiepolo's fresco -- painted so that the Pisani ascend into an open sky, with allegories arranged around them.

The park is Frigimelica's, and is as designed as the house: a long axis from the villa to the exedra, with the great stables closing the view -- a building handsome enough to be mistaken for the villa itself.

The maze, of clipped hedge with a small tower at its centre, is one of the oldest and most difficult surviving garden labyrinths in Italy.

The long basin in front of the stables is a nineteenth-century addition, and is what most photographs of the villa actually show.

Tiepolo's ceiling

The Apotheosis of the Pisani Family, 1761-62, in the ballroom -- among his last Italian works, and painted at the height of his powers.

The maze

Clipped hedges with a tower at the centre, genuinely difficult, and one of the oldest surviving in Italy.

The stables

Frigimelica's stable block closes the park's axis and is grander than most villas on the Brenta.

114 rooms

Matching Alvise Pisani's number in the line of Doges -- the whole building is a family's argument about its own standing.