Yesterday we returned to visit Palazzo Grimani in Venice . A place suspended, enchantingly, between different dimensions of soul and reason : it is worth attempting the hint of a sketch, so that enthusiasts can find inspiration to delve deeper. Giovanni Grimani was the Patriarch of Aquileia , a title that had long been a monopoly of the family. Venice, however, was pushing for a change of hands, leveraging the accusations of heresy that involved him and which would never lea

The Accademia Galleries have just opened a whole new section, six rooms along the splendid Palladian loggia, an extraordinary architectural space that not many people know about. Andrea, as we know, like Proto, does not even create a public work in Venice. Not the Rialto Bridge, not the reconstruction of the Doge's Palace after the fire: nothing to be done. However, he is the architect of the families linked to the ecclesiastical world: here are the wonderful churches, such

«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

Vicenza is an ancient dream , one in which we can still today dive , let ourselves go, forget for a moment — for a day, a week — that everything must be done for something, that there must be some small daily and concrete purpose. To forget a life lived in survival mode and to savour, inhale, aspire to something great, magnificent, ideal. Vicenza is real, but there is also a Vicenza that exists beyond. One that exists in the wings of the Teatro Olimpico , one that existed in

On Sunday the 21st, Palazzo Valmarana Braga in Vicenza will host the event organized by the Italian Historic Houses Association. It will be an opportunity to recall a remarkable moment  in the life of one of the most beautiful palaces  within the UNESCO-listed Palladian heritage. As so often happens, that moment was born from tragedy : the bombing of the palace during the Second World War, on March 18, when it was partly destroyed and reduced to what seemed an irrecoverable r

Vicenza is Palladio for everyone, and we could not agree more.But Palladio is not an end: he is an opening gesture, a threshold.His architecture gives the impression of something complete, and yet its true nature is generative. It invites continuations, variations, reinterpretations —some born in Vicenza, some across Veneto’s gentle inland, and others far from here, in the wider world. His presence survives not only in the architects who studied him, but in the painters and

It was an era of profound transformations and great hopes in the heart of South Africa, in those years that were shaping the future of the country. Four British colonies, Natal, Cape of Good Hope, Transvaal, and Orange Free State, came together to create a new political entity, born from the ashes of colonial rule over the Boer republics. The establishment of the Union of South Africa was an attempt to unite the diverse communities and their interests under one government, i