Discover Villa Pisani at Stra

The villa is Baroque rather than Palladian, and the difference is the point: where a Palladian villa is compact and templed, this is a long, tall palace front of enormous width, meant to overwhelm.

The garden facade is the show front, with a giant order of columns and a crowded skyline of statues.

Inside, the ballroom rises through two storeys, and its ceiling carries Tiepolo's fresco -- painted so that the Pisani ascend into an open sky, with allegories arranged around them.

The park is Frigimelica's, and is as designed as the house: a long axis from the villa to the exedra, with the great stables closing the view -- a building handsome enough to be mistaken for the villa itself.

The maze, of clipped hedge with a small tower at its centre, is one of the oldest and most difficult surviving garden labyrinths in Italy.

The long basin in front of the stables is a nineteenth-century addition, and is what most photographs of the villa actually show.