Vicenza is a northern city, lying about halfway - 35 miles in each direction - between Verona and Venice, which may be one reason why this quiet burg is overlooked by tourists who flock instead to Romeo and Juliet's balcony or the waterways of the Queen of the Adriatic. And although this provincial capital of 120,000 people has a plain setting amid farmland, it is the dramatic stage for a banquet of buildings from a man considered the most singularly influential in the history of Western architecture.
By marrying the grandeur of classical Greek and Roman design with the humanist sensibility of the Renaissance, Palladio (1508-80) fashioned a new aesthetic that brought him fame in his time and lasting distinction to Vicenza, which is designated a UNESCO World Heritage City with 23 sites listed in the historic center and 28 more in the countryside.
Many of Palladio's spare and elegant palaces, city buildings, and country villas are open to the public. For the ultimate in archi-tourist vacations, one villa is available for rental by the week.
Getting around the compact city center is easy, so I took a walking tour to get an overview of the architect's impact. His namesake boulevard, Corso Andrea Palladio, is an 800-yard showcase of palaces by him and his contemporaries, rich in his signature details of columns, pediments, and porticoes.
The Piazza dei Signori, the central square, has a magnificent example of Palladio's style: the Basilica, which is not a religious building but a medieval-era meeting hall to which he added a two-story loggia in white Piovene stone to create an interplay of light and shade through arches and porthole windows. The effect is like painterly chiaroscuro drawn in stone and plaster.
In buildings such as the ornate Palazzo Chiericati, now the city's art museum, Palladio's treatment is theatrical in design. But just across the street his masterpiece, the Teatro Olimpico, is so understated, at least from the outside, that you might not know it's there at all. The first covered theater of the modern world, which is still in use for concerts and plays today, is tucked in the courtyard of a 13th-century castle.
