I had my wings unfold to offer the maximum opening, the widest image to the eye, of what was transformed from a house into a palace with the least effort. The dovecote towers at the ends conclude the barchesse , which do not actually reach the central main body, thus leaving it free from stables and cellars, elevated on a high podium preceded by a triumphal staircase . Leonardo Emo. Leonardo like his grandfather, who had left him the estate in which he had introduced, for t

Giovanni Alvise , the emperor's first reference here in Vicenza, was one of my great supporters, from the very beginning. He, obviously in addition to Giangiorgio Trissino and Gerolamo Chiericati , worked in my favor on several occasions in the city council to give me the most important public work in the city, that of the loggias of the basilica . Many years later I was able to repay, having in the meantime continued to work for the Valmarana family , with this building at

Gerolamo Chiericati had been one of my first supporters, together with Giangiorgio Trissino and Giovanni Alvise Valmarana , to obtain the first public work in Vicenza, the loggias of the Palazzo della Ragione. I had the opportunity to repay him a few years later, suggesting that he seize an extraordinary opportunity: not one of the many buildings on the main road, which will then take my name: but the scenic backdrop of the landing in Vicenza , obviously from Venice, on the

I had learned in Rome that there was not always a need for great ornamentation and pomp for an architecture to be harmonious and important. Casta villa la Saraceno remains one of my favorites : every time I thought about the design of a new architecture, and especially the facade, I started with the character of the client, so that the villa would suit the owner's suit. In this case Biagio Saraceno - of an ancient Roman family - had recently taken on important public office

I was 67 when a terrible plague epidemic broke out in the middle of summer, killing one in three Venetians. After a year, the Senate decides to invoke divine help by voting for a new church . A few years ago I had succeeded Sansovino in the position of Proto della Serenissima, or chief architect of the Republic : I was designing inspired, relentlessly, an intertwining of floors and volumes of white marble, bricks and marmorino that grew quickly, for the first procession o

If the city palace in Contrà Riale for Ludovico and Francesco Trissino has remained on paper, their villa has been started, one can read more about it on the spot than an intention. If it had been built in its entirety ... A grandiose work , a multi-level acropolis culminating in another Rotonda , embraced by the barchesse that in these same years managed to see the light at Villa Badoer .

Poetry. It is poetry created by history, which I could never have come up with on my own. Also because the Porto, or Da Porto , wanted a palace, and not two bays, to dominate that Piazza Castello overlooked by a palace of Francesco Thiene, husband of Isabella Da Porto. Yet history broke my vision, making it a fragment, like the trace of an ancient ruin, the representation of an idea in its creative act, an architectural unfinished , a section through the centuries.

In Vicenza, which in 49 B.C. it became a Roman municipium, in the corner of the cardo with the current Lampertico contrà was the domus, a residential area for the wealthy people of Vicenza. In the 2nd century AD. one of these houses was enlarged with an apsidal hall called domus ecclesiae and became a meeting place for the first Christians. At the end of the 14th century in that place, the Cathedral was built with a semicircular apse and three naves. In 425, while Marcello of

In Roman times, south of the Via Postumia, there was a pagan necropolis, where even the first Christians buried their dead; here developed the cult of the brothers Felice and Fortunato de Rainoni, martyred in Aquileia in the Domitian period. Towards the end of the 4th century a simple ecclesiae hall of about 10X16 meters was erected; simple in structure but with a rich musile floor, still visible inside the basilica. In 452 the hordes of Attila attacked and devastated the