Discover Villa Serego

The surviving fragment is a courtyard, open on one side, surrounded by a two-storey colonnade.

The columns are the point. Palladio built them up out of rough, unfinished stone drums of irregular depth, so each shaft reads as a stack of quarried blocks rather than a smooth classical column. The effect is deliberately primitive -- a learned reference to the rustic origins of the orders, and the sort of thing Mannerist architects did to demonstrate that they knew the rules well enough to break them.

Nothing else in Palladio's built work looks like this, which is why the villa matters out of proportion to how much of it exists.

The intended design, published in the Quattro Libri, shows a much larger house with two courtyards. Comparing the engraving with what stands is most of the interest of a visit.

The estate buildings around it are later and agricultural.