Northern Italy is stunning. Today the three of us started our quest to see the top Palladian Villas in the region. Each was commissioned for a different family, each one has a story to tell, and it's inspiring how much love and effort has gone into restoring and maintaining these gems. I did not realize
until I started this tour of the famous Veneto region that the US Capital and most US East Coast architecture was based on Palladio's designs from the Sixteenth Century. The architecture, the mathematics, and the amazing art, especially the frescos by Veronese, bring the Rennaissance to life. Between my two smart friends, Mark and Frederic, I am really enjoying my history lessons... I clearly did not pay attention in history class! We were all talking over lunch today (it's not a pizza, it's a dream... we were warned... and it was phenomenal food) about who is going to own a property in Paris, Bologna, the Veneto, San Francisco, Hawaii, etc... so we can all spend time each year in a different part of the world... Lotto, Lotto....
Villa Barbaro
With its astronomical sun-dial used for the calendar, and on the other side of the estate is the sun-dial to track time... you cannot tell from the pix, but each position on the dial is marked by the corresponding astrological symbol... so you knew it was mid-April by the line moving to the Bull for Taurus...
The
Grotto at Villa Barbaro...The slippers required to walk the 500 year old parquet and stone floors...
Very fragrant... very old...
Every Villa needs a church... actually, roads seems to lead you directly in front of the church in each town/village... I think this must be how one would navigate from town to town... steeples dotting the entire region...
It was all about the Impression of wealth.... the center structure was raised high off the land to both 'see' and 'be seen'.... while the extended sections were for daily living... remember, these were farmers who still needed a working farm to build/maintain their wealth.
The symbol of The Venetian Republic: the winged lion... Seen everywhere of course...
The famous sculptor Canova paid for his own temple (church) to house his body for eternity... copied from the Pantheon in Rome, which was singularly one of the most impressive sights in Rome for me... The precision of the architecture can be experienced by the fact you can hear someone talking in a regular voice from every angle at any distance within the interior...
When Rome fell in 410 AD (around that time, don't quote me), a thousand years of dark ages followed which includes the creation of Islam, waves of plague, significant reduction of the world's population... thus it makes sense that art, music, architecture, science, etc. exploded and flourished when the Renaissance began in the 15th Century, all the way through the 18th Century as the Renaissance moved north throughout Europe. Did you know Corn, Tomatoes, Potatoes, and many other "ordinary" foods were introduced from the New World into Europe only a few hundred years ago? I didn't. Good ol' Christopher Columbus...
Tonight we enjoyed our evening meal from the Wisteria and Olive covered loggia of our little piece of paradise watching the sun set across the layers of mountains that eventually peak in the Alps. I watched an hour of news: one minute on the US and the other 59 minutes were about the rest of the world.
Buona Notte my friends....
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