In a few years since the beginning of my education, the word had begun to spread, and this was my first villa for a Venetian family: the Pisans , who had received from the Serenissima the fiefdom confiscated from the Nogarole of Verona for their loyalty to emperor in the League of Cambrai. For the three brothers, Marco, Daniele and Vettore I have created a powerful villa , reworking several ideas from my first trips to Verona and Rome.

Mine or not mine? Mine in any case, to the extent that mine is the “ Palladian ” style that was already beginning to be imitated in my time, as it will be in the following centuries in different parts of the world. In the garden of the Valmaranas, for Leonardo son of my great friend Giovanni Alvise, under the walls of Porta Castello, a loggia is reflected in double symmetry on the veil of water. It is form and substance, it is idea and matter, it is vision and reality.

Domenico Bollani was an important official of the Serenissima. Ambassador to London in those same years of Daniele Barbaro , later mayor and then bishop in Brescia. It was the city of Udine, where I worked for the Antonini family , that asked me for a celebratory bow capable of expressing a sense of gratitude towards Venice , and in particular towards Lieutenant Bollani, who had managed the plague emergency in those years very well '56. The lion of Marciano would have dom

My first villa! I was still collaborating with the Pedemuro workshop, the most renowned construction company in Vicenza, as a specialist for architecture, despite having met the man who would transform my life during the design. As has often happened, time has given it its own shape, beyond my renovation project; however, the imprint of my simple hand and the will of Gerolamo and his brothers to maintain the sobriety of a nobility of knights remain.

What Giangiorgio Trissino had been in the first part of my story, the Barbaro brothers were in the second. Among the most important patricians of Venice , a family historically linked to the Church, both Daniele and Marcantonio also knew a great deal about architecture , as well as the symbolic importance of its language . My works, in Venice , were a political act ... Their villa is perhaps the richest of all: the cycle of frescoes by my friend Veronese is overwhelming.

The "Magnifico Signor Francesco Badoero" , actually not as important as the surname he bore, had joined with a Loredàn , thus inheriting the Vespara fund, to be reclaimed, in the south of our peaceful lands between Adige and Po. Of an old castle I finally managed to create an Ionic temple facade, embraced by curved barchesse to welcome visitors, as in the temple of Augustus in Rome .

Enlightened patrician from Vicenza , I am honored to have been a great friend of Giacomo Angarano , who hosted the wedding of my daughter Zenobia in his palace in Vicenza . A man of great spirituality and a great lover of architecture , I dedicated the first half of the Quattro Libri to him, but I also designed the Villa with the Barchesse among the vineyards that still adorn it today. I contributed in part, as did the tragic fate that befell his family .

The pride of my life: the most important public work of the city that adopted me. Not Sansovino , not Sanmicheli , not Giulio Romano . Among the best architects in the world, they finally chose me . Would I ever be able to repay the debt of gratitude I contracted with Alvise Valmarana , for Gerolamo Chiericati and obviously with Giangiorgio Trissino ?

I was finishing the illustration of Daniele Barbaro 's work, the translation and commentary of Vitruvius's De Architectura , when I was introduced to Nicolò and Alvise Foscari . I had not yet built anything in Venice . The Doge's nephews asked me to design the villa that they would quickly reach by boat, from Cà Foscari on the Grand Canal and from their other properties. Two years later it would have been the centenary of the great doge Francesco Foscari : I immediately