Villa Saraceno
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| Villa Saraceno | |
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| Building information | |
|---|---|
| Town | Agugliaro |
| Country | Italy |
| Architect | Andrea Palladio |
| Client | Biagio Saraceno |
| Construction start date | 1540s |
| Completion date | 1540s |
| Structural system | brick and wood; limited use of stone |
| Style | Palladian |
Villa Saraceno is a Palladian Villa in Agugliaro, Province of Vicenza, Italy.
[edit] Details
It is one of Palladio's earlier works and has been dated to the 1540s. It takes its name from the aristocratic family who commissioned it. In 1570 the building was illustrated in an imagined state in its architect's influential publication "Four Books of Architecture" [1]. However, the villa had been constructed in a more modest form, without the architect's "trade-mark" wings. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but are probably related to the fact that there was already a working farm on the site.
The villa is one of Palladio's simpler creations, but has a "piano nobile". The floor above was designed as a granary. As it stands today, the villa has a nineteenth-century wing which links it to a fifteenth-century building.
The villa fell into a poor state of repair in the twentieth century but retained some of its original frescoes. It was acquired in 1989 by the British charity the Landmark Trust. By 1994 the Trust had completed its restoration, converting the property, which includes adjacent farm-buildings not by Palladio, into a holiday home sleeping up to 16 people. The many people who have since stayed in the villa include Witold Rybczynski, who used it as a base when researching his book on Palladio. The restoration has been praised for its sensitivity, and since 1996 the villa has enjoyed an additional level of protection, being conserved as one of the buildings which make up the World Heritage Site "City of Vicenza and Palladian Villas of the Veneto". The principal rooms of the villa are open to the public on a limited basis, but the Trust attracted some criticism in the past for not promoting the building as part of the World Heritage Site.[2] In 2008 the Landmark Trust announced it would celebrate the anniversary year of Palladio's birth with a new guidebook (price 50 euros) for the Villa Saraceno in English and Italian and extended opportunities for visiting.[3]
[edit] References
- ^ I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, Venice 1570, libro II, p. 56. This reference is to the second book (libro) of the first edition, which was written in the author's native Italian. Since the eighteenth century the work has appeared in various English translations: the first to be published was that of Giacomo Leoni, soon followed by the (arguably superior) version of Isaac Ware. The book is still in print ISBN 0486213080 or ISBN 978-0486213088
- ^ [1] UNESCO report retrieved 16 February 2008
- ^ The Landmark Trust | Visiting Trust properties
[edit] External links
The architecture of the Villa Saraceno is set in context by the Centro Internazionali di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio [2] (English) (Italian)
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