Paolo almerico biography

The Rotonda is the happy outcome of the meeting between the genius of Andrea Palladio, an architect at the peak of his career, and the nobleman from Vicenza Paolo Almerico , cultured, ambitious and haughty man. He was an ecclesiastic who, after his assignment in Rome as apostolic referendum of Popes Pius IV and Pius V, he retired to private life in his hometown: in he entrusted Palladio with the project for his new home on a hill on the outskirts of Vicenza, a bucolic refuge where he could spend the last years of his life far away from the hostility of the city's aristocracy, but at the same time a place of representation in a clearly visible position.

Villa rotonda architecture style

The hall is of the most beautiful proportions, as are the rooms; but all of this would barely be enough for the summer residence of a distinguished family" : the words of Goethe visiting the Rotonda in underline the eccentricity of this architectural project compared to other Palladian villas. The internal spaces, in fact, are organized according to a single person , just as the geometric relationships and symbolic references are a continuous celebration of its client, Paolo Almerico: the Rotonda merges the agricultural functions of a rural Venetian villa and the sacral dimension of a pagan temple as recalled by the columns of the four pronai or Christian symbolized by the domed vault at the center of which is the man of the sixteenth century.

A villa-temple , therefore, where Antiquity meets the aspirations of the Renaissance noble and where, like a microcosm, cosmic and natural forces manifest themselves. Neither Palladio nor Almerico saw the Rotunda completed: upon the architect's death in took over the management of the construction site Vincenzo Scamozzi , his disciple and refined designer.

He added the long barchessa along the access avenue to the villa and completed the dome, no longer semi-spherical as in the Palladian project, but with a lowered vault with a central oculus inspired by the Pantheon From Rome. Upon the death of Paolo Almerico in the villa passed to his natural son Virginio, who only held it for two years before handing it over to brothers Odorico and Mario Capra : In the the construction work was completed.

The Capra family, a lineage of nobles from Vicenza, preserved the suburban villa until the beginning of the nineteenth century and under its ownership various interventions and transformations took place in line with changes in taste: the decorations the frescoes of the dome and the corner rooms in the late sixteenth century, the creation of the stuccos and the placement of the sculptures on the acroteria between the end of the century and the early years of the seventeenth century, the construction of the Chapel based on a design by Girolamo Albanese around today in the park of the nearby Villa Valmarana ai Nani , the painter's intervention Louis Dorigny on the walls of the central room on the occasion of the marriage between Marzio and Cecilia Capra in the early eighteenth century, up to the more complex structural interventions of Francesco Muttoni between and He was responsible for the subdivision of the attic floor, which in the Palladian project was conceived as an open space with the function of a granary.

From Villa Almerico Capra underwent several changes of ownership, it was damaged during the Austrian attacks of on Vicenza and restored several times, until its purchase by the Valmarana family in