Description of the attraction
Palazzo Barbaran Da Porto is a palace in Vicenza, designed in 1569 and built a few years later by the architect Andrea Palladio. Since 1994, it has been included in the list of UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Sites "Palladian Villas of Veneto". Today, the Palazzo houses the Andrea Palladio Museum and the International Center for the Study of Architecture of this great Vicenza native.
The opulent Palazzo, built between 1570 and 1575 for the local aristocrat Montano Barbarano, is the only large palace in Vicenza built entirely by Palladio himself. In his 1591 "History of Vicenza", Jacopo Marzari describes Montano Barbarano as "a man of arts and an outstanding musician", and a variety of flutes appear in the palace inventory of those years, which confirms his words.
Today in London there are at least three author's projects of the Palazzo Barbaran Da Porto, which are very different from each other and differ from what a modern palace looks like. It is known that Barbarano asked Palladio to take into account the various structures that belonged to the family and already stood at the site of the proposed construction. Moreover, after the completion of the palace project, Barbarano acquired another house adjacent to his property, which became the reason for the asymmetric location of the main portal.
I must say that during the construction of the palace Palladio had to solve two problems: the first - how to support the floor of the main hall on the "drunken nobile", and the second - how to restore the symmetry of the interiors, broken by the sloping walls of the old houses. Based on the model of the Teatro Marcellus in Rome, Palladio divided the interior into three wings, placing four Ionic columns in the center. So he solved the first problem. Then the columns were connected to the walls of the buildings with the help of fragments of vertical architraves - this is how the solution to the second problem was found. In addition, it allowed the creation of a number of so-called "Palladian windows".
To decorate his palace, Barbarano hired the greatest painters of the time - Giovanni Battista Zelotti, Anselmo Caner and Andrea Vicentino. The stucco molding was done by Lorenzo Rubini and his son Agostino. The end result is a magnificent Palazzo that rivals the residences of Thiene, Porto and Valmarana and has allowed its owner to declare himself as an influential member of Vicenza society.
In 1998, after 20 years of restoration, Palazzo Barbaran da Porto was reopened to the public. And in 1999, it housed the Palladian Museum.
