"There is truly something divine in his projects, no less than the strength of the great poet, who draws a third reality from truth and fiction, fascinating in his fictitious existence". Thus wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, encountering Palladio's architecture on his trip to Italy more than two centuries ago.
And it is this almost spiritual dimension of Palladian architecture that moves us most every day, in the attempt to grasp it, in order to pass it on to our visiting friends.
Another way to tell it is to transform it into new art, by searching during our travels for some talented interpreters (even better if young) who want to try their hand at this exploration with us.
Collaborating with Valentina Marino, this original collection of artistic cyanotypes was thus created which evoke the dream of a Renaissance man and the collective dream of an entire city.
Distant...
Yet close.
Because here, we who live here, pass by it every day, several times a day.
There are those who scroll on their tape beyond without seeing, each normally immersed in the depths of their own galaxy...
Yet it's all here, available to anyone who wants to take a journey to a place halfway between the real and the dreamlike, accepting the idea that not everything needs to be brought into perfect rational focus, but that it can also just be perceived. , intuition, and only partially revealed.
Art and poetry live from this: from the attempt to enter into a relationship, to discover something behind, which is not measurable, which is not easily describable, which cannot be the object of scientific research.
Which is what we do every day, here at Palladian Routes: the truest and most important essence of the UNESCO Palladian Heritage, for us lives here, in this parallel universe to which we try to have and give access.
Certainly looking for the small door and the key on the table, certainly reconstructing that world in which the person who later became the most influential architect in history lived, thought and designed.
Reconstructing his personality, and that of his friends and clients. Reconstructing the social, economic, political and religious context of that Vicenza and that of Venice. Rebuilding the aquarium of works and projects that flourished in that late Renaissance throughout Italy. Rereading the treatises of Alberti and Serlio, rereading Vitruvius. Reconstructing, in each of Palladio's projects, the genesis of the general idea and the detail - from a remote past or a recent one. Reconstructing the static and cosmological sense, the quotation and the experiment, the invention and the interpretation.
But then, having done all this: what would we have done, if only we had limited ourselves to all this and limited ourselves?
A list of information. A very serious, very respectable, very interesting approach for professionals...
Yet we, who search - we specify - do not do... we rather choose to bring ourselves here by sliding on this inclined plane together with our loved ones, old and new. Trying to investigate and bring as many people as possible to that level that we can call the soul. To what, in our opinion, ultimately, most of all animated Palladio in the design of his villas, his palaces, his places.
To what Palladio later became an inspiration for entire peoples.
Questa, l'anima del Palladio, è quella che cerchiamo insieme ad amici come Valentina, che ha saputo cogliere ed esprimere con grande sentimento ciò che abbiamo condiviso. His works exclusively for us are here in our visitor center at Palazzo Valmarana Braga, ready to reveal landscapes and open passages together with all the other small doors that we carefully collect.
Discover our values, here