Villa Badoer
Villa Badoer is a villa in Fratta Polesine in the Veneto region of northern Italy. It was designed in 1556 by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio for the Venetian noble Francesco Badoer, and built between 1557 and 1563 on the site of a medieval castle, which guarded a bridge across a navigable canal. This was the first time Palladio used his fully developed temple pediment in the façade of a villa. Villa Badoer has been part since 1996 of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto". The building is open to the public and one of the wings houses the Museo archeologico nazionale di Fratta Polesine, opened in 2009. History In 1554, on the southern border of the Venetian Republic’s territories, in the flat and foggy country of Polesine, Palladio designed a villa for the Venetian noble Francesco Badoer, intended to become the epicentre of the vast agricultural estate of almost five hundred fields that he had inherited six years previously. Constructed and inhabited in 1556, the villa therefore functioned for the management of the fields and was simultaneously a visible sign of the “feudal” presence, so to speak, of Badoer in the territory: it is not coincidental that the building rises on the site of an ancient medieval castle. Palladio succeeded in uniting within one effective synthesis these dual meanings, joining the majestic manor house to the two barchesse (farm wings) bent into semicircles, which screen the stables and other agricultural annexes. The project by Palladio There are no surviving drawings by Palladio relating to Villa Badoer, nor any building accounts, except those published by the architect in his I quattro libri dell'architettura (1570). Probably as a result of exploiting the substructures of the medieval castle, the manor house of the villa rises on a high basement, and recalls precedents like the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano by Giuliano da Sangallo, and the not far distant Villa dei Vescovi at Luvigliano by Giovanni Maria Falconetto. Building on the old foundations saved money, and gave a slightly raised setting to the building. This manoeuvre rendered necessary a scenographic staircase of several flights leading to the front door of the villa, the main descending to the courtyard and the two lateral ones connecting with the gable-ends of the barchesse. Thus, the ensemble recalls the structures of an antique, terraced temple complex. The elegant curvilinear barchesse are the only ones that were realised by Palladio from the many projected (for example, those for the Villa Mocenigo on the Brenta, the Villa Thiene at Cicogna or the Villa Trissino at Meledo) and their shape – as Palladio writes – recalls arms opening to receive the visitor; the relevant antique source was very probably the exedrae of the Temple of Augustus in Rome. These originally housed agricultural activities, for this was a working villa, like Villa Emo and most of the villas by Palladio. Unusual among Palladio's completed works, the wings here do not touch