Villa della Torre Site Features

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.

The monster fireplaces

Four of them, carved as gaping mouths. Nothing else in the Veneto looks like this, and they are the reason to come.

The Roman atrium

A covered courtyard with a central pool, built as an educated reconstruction of an ancient house.

The chapel

Attributed to Michele Sanmicheli, and a calm counterpoint to the strangeness of the villa.

The cellar and the wine

The estate makes Amarone, and a visit generally combines the architecture with a tasting -- which is the natural way to see Valpolicella anyway.

The villa stands in the Fumane valley, one of the five that make up the Valpolicella Classico zone, on the lower slopes where the valley floor begins to rise.

The ground here is limestone, terraced and planted with corvina and the other Valpolicella varieties, with the Lessini mountains closing the head of the valley to the north.

The villa's own terraced gardens step down the slope, using the same fall of land that the vineyards around them do.