It is evident that, first of all for us, Giangiorgio Trissino is Andrea Palladio's mentor, in a certain sense his creator. In a broader sense, he was certainly the one who dedicated his life to the realization of the vision of his Olympic Vicenza.
But Trissino dal Vello d'Oro was also, or rather before, a literary theorist, a philologist, a playwright, a poet and an important innovator of Italian theater.
He was born in Vicenza in 1478, a decade before the publication of the first books printed in Italian.
In the history of modern European literature, Trissino has a special place because of his tragedy Sofonisba. Based on the life of the Carthaginian Sofonisba and inspired by ancient tragedies, it is perhaps the first true tragedy of the early modern period.
Trissino is known to have been one of the protagonists of the discussion on true literary Italian, espousing the theory of an Italian language of the court composed thanks to the contributions of the most refined centers of Italy, rather than being fundamentally of Tuscan origin.
In 1529, in Verona, Giangiorgio published the first Italian translation of a text by Dante, a small and dense treatise that is an implacable appeal to the legitimacy of the use of the Italian vernacular in literature.
Several of Trissino's locations are here, along this special Palladian E-Bike Experience, available from March 2022.