Villa Saraceno

Villa Saraceno
Front elevation
General information
Type	Villa
Architectural style	Palladian
Town or city	Agugliaro
Country	Italy
Coordinates	45°18′45″N11°33′59″E / 45.31250°N 11.56639°E / 45.31250; 11.56639 Coordinates: 45°18′45″N11°33′59″E / 45.31250°N 11.56639°E / 45.31250; 11.56639
Construction started	1540s
Completed	1540s
Renovated	1994
Client	Biagio Saraceno
Owner	Landmark Trust (United Kingdom)
Technical details
Structural system	brick and wood; limited use of stone
Design and construction
Architect(s)	Andrea Palladio
UNESCO World Heritage Site
Part of	City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto
Criteria	Cultural: (i), (ii)
Reference	712bis-012
Inscription	1994 (18th Session)
Extensions	1996
Area	0.59 ha (1.5 acres)

The Sala, 2007

Villa Saraceno is a Palladian Villa in Agugliaro, Province of Vicenza, northern Italy. It was commissioned by the patrician Saraceno family.

History

Villa Saraceno has been dated to the 1540s, which makes it one of Andrea Palladio's earlier works. In 1570, the building was illustrated in an imagined state in its architect's influential book I quattro libri dell'architettura . ^[1]

However, the villa had been constructed in a more modest form, and existing farm buildings were retained rather than being replaced by the architect's "trade-mark" wings. The reasons for the divergence between the published plan and the actual building are not entirely clear, but it is not the only one of Palladio's villas to be different from the published plan.^{[ citation needed ]} The incomplete Villa Trissino (Meledo di Sarego) is another example.

Architecture

Villa Saraceno is one of Palladio's simpler creations. Like most of Palladio's villas it combines living space for its upper-class owners with space for uses related to agriculture. Above the piano nobile is a floor which was designed as a granary.

As it stands today, the villa has a nineteenth-century wing which links it to a fifteenth-century building.

• 
  Floor plan from I quattro libri dell'architettura
• 
  Cross section (drawing by Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi, 1778)

Restoration and current use of the villa

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. ^[2]

Dining room, 2017

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 the Palladian Villas of the Veneto". The principal rooms of the villa are open to the public on a limited basis, ^[3] but the Trust attracted some criticism in the past for not promoting the building as part of the World Heritage Site. ^[4] In 2008, the Landmark Trust celebrated the 500th anniversary of Palladio's birth with a new guidebook for the Villa Saraceno in English and Italian and extended opportunities for visiting.

See also

• Palladian Villas of Veneto
• Palladian architecture

References

1. 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   0-486-21308-0 or ISBN   978-0-486-21308-8
2. The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (2002)
3. The Landmark Trust | Visiting Landmark Trust properties (www.landmarktrust.org.uk), retrieved 24 April 2010 Archived December 19, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
4. Joint UNESCO-ICOMOS Mission to City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto, 2005 Report by UNESCO and ICOMOS, retrieved 16 February 2008

External links

• Villa Saraceno - Finale di Agugliaro - (1543) (in English and Italian)

The architecture of the Villa Saraceno is set in context by the Centro Internazionali di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio (www.cisapalladio.org).