Discover Tempio Canoviano

The portico is eight Doric columns across, taken from the Parthenon with an archaeologist's literalness rather than a Palladian's adaptation. This was deliberate: Canova had spent his career among classical originals in Rome and wanted the real thing, not the eighteenth-century idea of it.

The rotunda behind it is derived from the Pantheon, domed and top-lit, and it is what makes the interior work. Light falls from above onto a circular space, and the sculpture and altarpieces around the walls are lit the way Canova would have lit objects in a studio.

The apse at the rear is Christian and semicircular, the one element that declares the building a church rather than a reconstruction.

The siting matters as much as the fabric. It stands on a terrace at the top of a long approach above the village, so that it is read from below as a temple on a hill — not as a parish church on a street. Canova understood sightlines, and he used them here.