Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
SIGHTS
The heart of Vicenza is
Piazza dei Signori
, where Palladio lightens the mood of government
buildings with his trademark play of light and shadow. Dazzling white Piovene stone
arches frame shady double arcades in the Basilica Palladiana, while across the piazza,
white stone and stucco grace the exposed red-brick colonnade of the 1571- designed Log-
gia del Capitaniato. Palladio's most iconic building, La Rotonda, can be found a short
20-minute walk to the south.
BASILICA PALLADIANA
( 0444 22 21 14; Piazza dei Signori; temporary exhibtions €9-12; temporary exhibitions only)
This immense
basilica with its wraparound arcades dominates Piazza dei Signori, its copper dome remin-
iscent of the hull of an upturned ship. It was modelled on a Roman basilica (hence the
name), and in its day it would have housed the law courts and Council of Four Hundred up-
stairs and a mall of luxury shops downstairs in the tradition of the markets on the Rialto.
Palladio was lucky to secure the commission in 1549 (it took patron Trissano 50 years of
lobbying the Council), which involved radically restructuring the original Gothic
palazzo
after the loggia around it collapsed. Palladio's solution: an even more ambitious double or-
der of loggias, supported by Tuscan and Ionic columns topped by soaring statuary.
Inside, the awesome 52m hall is uninterrupted by internal supports and now - after a
€20-million refurbishment - serves as a vast exhibition space. If the inaugural show,
Raphael to Picasso
, which featured 85 extraordinary canvases spanning Old Masters such
as Bellini, Giorgioni, Rubens and El Greco, to modernist masterpieces by Edvard Munch,
Lucien Freud and Andrew Wyeth, is anything to go by, Palladio's basilica could once again
put Vicenza on the map.
LANDMARK, ART GALLERY
GALLERIE DI PALAZZO LEONI MONTANARI
MAP
MUSEUM
GOOGLE MAP
( 800 57 88 75;
www.gallerieditalia.com
;
Contrà di Santa Corona 25; adult/reduced €5/4; 10am-6pm Tue-Sun)
From the outside it looks like a bank, but a treasure beyond accountants' imagining awaits
inside the Palazzo Leoni Montanari. Ascend past the nymphs along the extravagant stuc-
coed staircase to grand salons filled with Canaletto's misty lagoon landscapes and Pietro
Longhi 18th-century satires such as
Tutors of Venier's House,
in which a sassy child with
hand on hip wears out exasperated tutors.
