Villa Badoer Historical Timeline

Francesco Badoer built between about 1556 and 1563, on the site of an earlier fortification — which is why the house sits where it does rather than where the view would have put it. Palladio published the design in the Quattro Libri, and the villa is known locally as La Badoera.

The interior was frescoed by Giallo Fiorentino in grotesques — the fantastical Roman-derived ornament that had been fashionable since the rediscovery of Nero's Domus Aurea — rather than the dynastic scenes a patron might have chosen elsewhere.

It is publicly owned today, and one of the barchesse holds the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Fratta Polesine. Its collection comes from Frattesina, a few kilometres away: a late Bronze Age settlement that worked glass, amber and bronze and traded across the Mediterranean roughly 3,200 to 2,900 years ago. The pairing is an accident of where the museum was put, but it makes this the one villa where the visit is half architecture and half prehistory.