Villa Almerico Capra (La Rotonda)
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The whole villa is turned 45 degrees from the cardinal points so that every room receives direct sunlight at some time of day.
- Scamozzi built a lower dome than Palladio had drawn, crowned by an oculus meant to be open to the sky like the Pantheon's.
- Palladio published the design in his Four Books of Architecture in 1570, yet the finished building differs from his printed plates.
- The villa took nearly four decades to finish: begun in 1567, it was completed only in 1605.
- Each of the four porticoes stands on six Ionic columns, and statues by the sculptor Lorenzo Vicentino line their parapets.
- Joseph Losey filmed his 1979 screen version of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the villa.
- Goethe visited on 22 September 1786 and wrote that architecture had perhaps never reached a higher level of magnificence.
- Its offspring reach well beyond Chiswick, including Mereworth Castle and Foots Cray Place in England and the Królikarnia palace in Warsaw.
- Count Andrea Valmarana bought the villa in 1912, and it is still owned by his great-grandson.
Why it is worth it
La Rotonda is the villa that taught the world what a country house could look like. Andrea Palladio designed it for Paolo Almerico, a cleric who retired from the papal court in 1565 and wanted a house on a hill just outside his native Vicenza. Work began in 1567; after Palladio's death in 1580 and Almerico's in 1589, Vincenzo Scamozzi carried the project on, and the Capra brothers, who bought the property in 1591, completed it — hence its full name, Villa Almerico Capra.
The design is almost a geometric proposition. A square block has four identical façades, each fronted by a projecting temple portico, so that the house presents the same face to every point of the compass and to every view of the surrounding countryside. At the centre a circular hall rises into a dome, and the rooms around it are proportioned according to Palladio's own mathematical rules.
Inside, the frescoes are by Alessandro and Giovanni Battista Maganza and Anselmo Canera, with stucco work by Domenico Fontana and Ruggero Bescapè. The house's influence spread far beyond the Veneto: Chiswick House in England and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia all descend from it. Together with Vicenza's other Palladian buildings it has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1994, and it is still privately owned by the Valmarana family.
Getting there
The villa stands on a low hill about 2 km from the centre of Vicenza. The nearest airport is Treviso Airport (TSF), about 51 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza 2.2 km · theatre-building
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Villa La Rotonda is a Renaissance villa just outside Vicenza in Northern Italy designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, and begun in 1567, though not completed until 1605. The villa's official name is Villa Almerico Capra Valmarana, but it is also known as "La Rotonda", "Villa Rotonda", "Villa Capra", and "Villa Almerico Capra". The name Capra derives from the Capra brothers, who completed the building after they acquired it in 1592. Along with other works by Palladio, the building is conserved as part of the World Heritage Site "City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto".
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