Description of the attraction
Villa Trissino is the residence of Gian Giorgio Trissino, located in Cricoli near the center of Vicenza. For the most part, it was built in the 16th century according to a design traditionally attributed to Andrea Palladio. Since 1994, the building has been included in the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List.
This Villa Trissino is not to be confused with another unfinished building of the same name located 20 km from Sarego and designed by Palladio for Ludovico and Francesco Trissino.
It is not known exactly when Palladio began work on the Villa Trissino project, but it was she who became the beginning of the legend of the great architect. It is said that in the second half of the 1530s, the Venetian aristocrat Gian Giorgio Trissino met a young bricklayer named Andrea di Pietro, who was working on the construction of his villa. Trissino was able to discern in the young man an undisguised talent and enormous potential and became his patron - it was he who introduced him into the circle of the Venetian aristocracy and contributed to the transformation of a simple bricklayer into the famous Andrea Palladio.
Gian Giorgio Trissino himself was a writer, author of theatrical plays and works on grammar. In Rome, he was a member of the circle of Pope Leo X Medici, where he met Raphael himself. Also an architectural connoisseur, he was probably the author of the project to rebuild the family villa in Cricoli, which he inherited from his father.
Trissino did not demolish the pre-existing buildings, but remodeled them in such a way as to highlight the main facade facing south. Between the two ancient towers, he placed a two-story arched loggia, inspired by Raphael's façade of the Villa Madama in Rome. Trissino, on the other hand, transformed the interiors into a series of side rooms, different in size, but with interrelated proportions.
Construction work at Villa Trissino was completed in 1538. At the end of the 18th century, the Vicentina architect Otone Calderari significantly modified the building, and in the early years of the 20th century, another reconstruction completely destroyed the traces of the Gothic structure, bringing to the end its "palladianization".
