In Vicenza, tourism was born centuries ago thanks to some important visitors who were passionate and curious about Palladio's works, just a few years after his death. We choose just a few here, jumping from one century to the next and remaining in the proximity of what today is by far the most visited attraction. The first official tourists that history remembers were the very young representatives of the Tenshō Embassy , ​​traveling from Japan to Europe between 1582 and 1590

How many of us know the saying "Saint Lucia, the shortest day there is"? Well, this famous saying, however, nowadays is not exactly correct because it dates back to the period up to 1582, when the winter solstice fell on December 13th. In that same year Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar, because it no longer corresponded to reality. A calendar was therefore adopted, where scientific calculations place the shortest day at the winter solstice, which falls between 21 and 2

On this same day, November 30th, but 514 years ago, in Padua, I, Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, was born into a humble artisan family. I still didn't know that my life would become so prolific and important for all architecture to come. I was just a humble stonemason, until I met the person who would become my mentor, Giangiorgio Trissino : it was he who gave me the name for which I would be known by everyone, who educated me and made me gain knowledge that I never could hav

Could Mozart and Palladio not have met? Like many of the greats, they too met: of course, not physically, not historically. More precisely, it was Mozart who met Palladio , during his visit to the city that had adopted the Paduan stonemason, when he had been his contemporary. It happened 253 years ago, on March 14, 1771. Mozart is concluding his very successful tour in Italy, obviously together with his father Leopoldo. Wolfgang is in fact 15 years old, and already famous. Th

We all know the fame of this great nineteenth-century man of letters, but perhaps not many know that Ugo Foscolo lived and deeply loved the Veneto . The poet was born in Zakynthos, then under Venetian possession, in 1778 to a doctor father, trained at the University of Padua and a Greek noblewoman mother. After the premature death of his father, at the age of 14, Ugo, with his mother and brothers, moved to Venice, where he learned and practiced the Venetian dialect, honing th

That's right, Veneto boasts the first woman graduate in the world , Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia : it is precisely in Padua that Elena graduated in philosophy in 1678. Natural daughter of the noble Giovanni Battista Cornaro, prosecutor of San Marco, and of the commoner Zanetta Boni, she was born in Venice in 1646, the fifth of seven children. She was enrolled in the honor roll of nobles at 18, when her father shelled out 100,000 ducats to elevate her and her brothers to p

«It is nothing more than a spiral staircase, but you never get tired of going up and down» , wrote Goethe in his Journey to Italy. There is one project, in Palladio's Four Books , only one "modern" project, not Italian. It is the double elliptical staircase of the Château de Chambord, in France. As everyone knows, Leonardo Da Vinci decided to end his career, and his life, at the court of the cultured and refined Francesco I, with the high-sounding title of premier peintre,

The Valmarana family , that of Giovanni Alvise and his much praised wife, and later widow, Isabella Nogarole. The Valmarana family of Palazzo Valmarana (now Braga Rosa), where we are based, the business network of the Palladians, the owners of the Palladio Villas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That of Leonardo, prince of the Olympic Academy at the Olympic Theatre. Well, that Valmarana family lives here, still, in these walls, here among the environments in which we work, here

The feeling was that of having something important to say, or rather to do, but not knowing how. The world sparkled around him, but behind the confines of his workshop, beyond the entrance halls of the patrician palaces, and beyond the walls of that Venetian city, beyond the curves of an ancient Roman road that was lost towards dreams of silk and into excavations of other lost worlds, reborn as phoenixes. Andrea moved away a little from the almost complete Ionic capital to te