Villa Foscari (La Malcontenta) Site Features

The villa is a single compact block on a high podium, with an Ionic portico on the water front reached by two converging flights of steps.

The podium is a response to the site. The Brenta floods, so the living floor is lifted well clear of the ground, and what looks like classical dignity is also flood engineering.

The plan is Palladio's characteristic cross-shaped central hall, with rooms of carefully related proportions opening off it -- the mathematics of the room sizes is the part architects come for.

The rear elevation carries a large thermal window, borrowed from Roman bath architecture, lighting the hall.

Inside, the walls carry frescoes by Battista Franco and Giambattista Zelotti, mythological and allegorical, covering the hall and principal rooms.

There are no barchesse. That absence is the building's most telling feature: this villa never had to work.

The portico and podium

Ionic columns on a high base, facing the Brenta -- the view that every visitor arriving by water was meant to get.

The cross-shaped hall

Palladio's central space, with the proportional relationships between rooms that make this a textbook building.

The Zelotti frescoes

Mythological cycles across the hall and principal rooms, contemporary with the architecture.

The thermal window

A semicircular Roman bath window lighting the hall from the rear -- a direct quotation from antiquity.