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Food & Drink Designed by Andrea Palladio in 1547, this work remained unfinished and is currently privately owned.
This modest building is the transformation of a pre-existing structure into a new architectural work. In 1547, Vincenzo Arnaldi, one of the wealthiest and most influential aristocrats in Vicenza, commissioned Andrea Palladio to renovate a 15th-century agricultural complex he had recently purchased. The reason was, so to speak, instrumental: the improvements to the property were intended to increase its value in view of a legal dispute involving one of the previous owners. In 1565, once an agreement was reached, Vincenzo halted the construction and rented out the house without further concern for completing the work.
Villa Arnaldi
the work
remained unfinished
In a series of Palladio’s autograph drawings, it is possible to follow the architect’s attempts to intervene in the irregular 15th-century complex. He sought to regularize the buildings facing the courtyard and to find symmetry in the new layout of the house’s rooms, which he organized around a three-arched loggia with smaller rectangular openings on the sides that still exist today, although walled up, framing the windows with his usual profiles.
Initially, the building to the north was a church (now converted into a residence), followed by the unfinished manor house; to the east is an 18th-century barchessa and to the west a Gothic barchessa remodeled in more recent times. The manor house still preserves fragments of frescoes, a painted wooden ceiling, and two fireplaces, all dating back to the second half of the 16th century.
The more recent barchessa, with its incorporated dovecote tower, is an 18th-century work by Enea Arnaldi, an architect of some renown, who in 1740 arranged the entire complex of buildings constituting the property into a more organic form.
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