- Villa Saraceno
Infobox Historic building
|thumbcaption =
name =Villa Saraceno
location_town =Agugliaro
location_country =Italy
architect =Andrea Palladio
client =Biagio Saraceno
engineer =
construction_start_date=1540s
completion_date =1540s
date_demolished =
cost =
structural_system=brick and wood; limited use of stone
style =Palladian Villa Saraceno is a
Palladian Villa inAgugliaro ,Province of Vicenza , Italy.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" [
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 ofGiacomo Leoni , soon followed by the (arguably superior) version ofIsaac Ware . The book is still in print ISBN 0486213080 or ISBN 978-0486213088 ] .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 includeWitold 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 theWorld Heritage Site "City of Vicenza andPalladian 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. [ [http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2005/mis712-2005.pdf 2005 report] , (UNESCO -ICOMOS ), retrieved 16 February 2008] In 2008 the Landmark Trust announced it would celebrate the anniversary year of Palladio's birth with a new guidebook for the Villa Saraceno in English and Italian and extended opportunities for visiting. [ [http://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/visiting/openingtimes.htm#Villa The Landmark Trust | Visiting Trust properties ] ]References
External links
The architecture of the Villa Saraceno is set in context by the "Centro Internazionali di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio" [http://www.cisapalladio.org/veneto/scheda.php?sezione=4&architettura=33&lingua=e] en icon it icon
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
