Palazzo del Te

Interesting facts

The Hall of the Giants has such unusual acoustics that two people whispering in opposite corners can clearly hear each other.

Giulio Romano placed a real fireplace beneath the painted face of the fire-breathing giant Typhon, so the flames seemed to pour out of the fresco.

The floor of the Hall of the Giants was originally strewn with rounded stones, carrying the painted landscape of tumbling rocks right down to the visitor's feet.

Four of the horses in the Hall of Horses are named in inscriptions: Morel Favorito, Glorioso, Battaglia and Dario.

Federico's emblem, repeated across the palace, is a salamander with the motto Quod huic deest me torquet, roughly 'what this one lacks torments me'.

The salamander was believed to be untouched by the fires of love, a teasing contrast with the famously passionate duke who built the palace.

The young Francesco Primaticcio worked on the decoration here before leaving in 1532 for the court of Francis I, where he became a leading artist at Fontainebleau.

Around 1595 Vincenzo Gonzaga added a small bathing grotto encrusted with shells, coloured stones and rustic mosaic, completed later by his son Ferdinando.

The name Te is of uncertain origin: one theory derives it from a word for a grove of lime trees, another from a Latin word for a hut.

The palace's civic museum also keeps a collection of ancient Mesopotamian art, an unexpected companion to Giulio Romano's frescoes.

Why it is worth it

Palazzo Te is a palace built as a joke for those who knew the rules. Federico II Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, commissioned it as a pleasure villa on the Isola del Te, a marshy island outside the city walls where his family kept its stables, and gave the job to Giulio Romano, Raphael's most gifted pupil. The shell rose in about eighteen months from 1524, and a decade of decoration followed. The low, rusticated building around a square courtyard looks classical at first glance, but Giulio deliberately broke the grammar of ancient architecture: columns are spaced irregularly, and in the Doric frieze of the courtyard some triglyphs appear to have slipped out of place, as if the stone were about to give way. It is one of the founding works of Mannerism.

Inside, the rooms grow ever more extravagant. In the Hall of Horses, life-size portraits of the Gonzaga's favourite horses stand before painted landscapes and false niches, under a gilded coffered ceiling. The Chamber of Cupid and Psyche, the duke's dining room, tells the love story from Apuleius in sensual frescoes, a celebration of Federico's mistress Isabella Boschetti as much as of myth. Charles V was received here in 1530, on the visit when Federico was raised from marquess to duke.

Then comes the Hall of the Giants, painted from 1532 to 1535 under Giulio's direction. The giants who tried to storm Olympus are crushed by Jupiter's thunderbolts, and the painting covers every wall and the vault without a break, so that columns, rocks and bodies seem to collapse around the visitor from all sides. There is no corner for the eye to rest on, and nearly five centuries later the room still produces a genuine jolt. Beyond the palace, a garden with fish pools closes in a semicircular exedra, and the building now serves as a civic museum and arts centre.

Getting there

Palazzo Te stands on the southern edge of Mantua, about 1.7 km from the historic centre and an easy walk from it. The nearest airport is Verona Villafranca (VRN), about 29 km away; Mantua has its own railway station, from which the palace is reached on foot or by taxi.

Palazzo del Te

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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