Discover Villa della Torre

The plan is the villa's first surprise: rooms arranged around a rectangular atrium with a central pool, roofed and colonnaded, which is a Roman domus rather than a Renaissance villa.

The exterior is severe and heavily rusticated, with deliberately rough masonry contrasted against precise classical detail -- the standard Mannerist device of setting the crude against the refined.

The fireplaces are the famous element. Four monumental hearths carved as monstrous faces with open jaws, so the firebox sits in the creature's throat. They are grotesques in the strict sense, drawn from the ornamental vocabulary being rediscovered in Rome, and they are genuinely disconcerting at full scale.

The chapel attached to the villa is attributed to Sanmicheli and is a more conventionally beautiful piece of work than the house.

The gardens step down the slope in terraces, with a fishpond and grottoes -- the garden vocabulary of a Mannerist estate.