Villa Pisani Bonetti

Andrea Palladio

Visits
The Villa is open year-round by appointment

Contemporary Art Project at Villa Pisani
Each year this project presents a new contemporary art exhibition.
Part of the permanent collection is on display.

Education
Educational visit service with specialized operators for primary and secondary schools.
Materials available for teachers and students. Picnic facilities available

Contact:
Villa Pisani Bonetti
Via Risaie 1 – 36045 Bagnolo di Lonigo (Vicenza)
tel. 0444 831104 fax 0444 835517
villa@villapisanibonetti.it – website: www.villapisani.net

History
Separated from Bagnolo only by the Guà River stands the beautiful Villa Pisani Bonetti, an early masterpiece by one of history’s greatest architects: Andrea di Pietro dalla Gondola, known as Palladio.

The villa’s history is closely linked to that of the town of Bagnolo and its territory: the Pisani, a wealthy Venetian family, purchased the estate to cultivate rice, given the abundant water in the area.

Palladio began working on the project around 1542, incorporating all those classical architectural elements he had been able to admire during his first journey to Rome.

Thus the main façade (now obscured by the river embankment, raised in the nineteenth century to protect against flooding from the Guà River) resembles a Roman triumphal arch with three openings, a city gate, rather than the entrance to a house.

The Doric pilasters emerging from the pillars, the rusticated stonework decorating the central section, the elegant balustrades and the semicircular central staircase adorn the entrance, crowned by an architrave animated by triglyphs supporting a triangular pediment with the Pisani coat of arms at its center.

Palladio’s architecture always dialogues with the surrounding landscape: in this case the façade, before the embankments were raised, served as a scenic backdrop for a road that still runs perfectly straight for five kilometers, following the route of the ancient Roman centuriation.

The typical elements of Palladian poetics are already all present at Bagnolo: perfect symmetry (on the main façade, but also inside); classical architectural elements (the double-apsed loggia, the thermal windows of the central hall, the barrel vaults joining in a cross vault) and simplicity of forms (the repetition of only three architectural modules in creating the plan of the piano nobile).

The paintings inside, present only in the large central hall and in another room, have been attributed to Francesco Torbido, known as il Moro, a painter and pupil of Giulio Romano in the second half of the sixteenth century; the themes refer to stories related to water (legend of Phaethon) and to villa life (perhaps inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, in the small “music room”), surrounded by grotesques, very fashionable in those years.

The other rooms of the villa develop symmetrically around the hall: noteworthy are the “map room,” which features some interesting period maps on the walls, and the large kitchen, with a beautiful washbasin hypothesized to have been modeled by Andrea Palladio himself (who was, after all, a stonemason).

In recent years the villa’s tourist and cultural offerings have expanded considerably thanks to frequent contemporary art exhibitions and educational programs aimed at primary and secondary school students.

noble Venetian family

The Pisani Family

The history of Lonigo intersects with that of the noble Venetian Pisani family beginning in 1523: it was on November 3 of that year that Zuanne (Giovanni) Pisani purchased the Bagnolo estate from the Republic of Venice, which had confiscated it from the Nogarola family, guilty of treason against the Serenissima. The Pisani became owners of 1,200 fields and the old Nogarola palace and acquired the title of “counts of Bagnolo” with all the feudal rights connected to it.

Upon Zuanne’s death, the Bagnolo properties passed to his sons (Vettore, Marco and Daniele) who, despite their young age, proved very enterprising: in 1542 they commissioned Andrea Palladio to build the manor house at Bagnolo (Villa Pisani) and the immense barchesse; they expanded their holdings by purchasing hundreds of new fields; they had a palace built in the center of Lonigo (Palazzo Pisani, second half of the 1550s) and a villa on a nearby hill (the Rocca Pisana, 1576), the work of Vincenzo Scamozzi.

The most imposing of the interventions carried out by the Pisani brothers was the colossal reclamation of the marshy lands of Bagnolo: they had embankments and sluices arranged, ditches dug and streams diverted, giving the territory its current appearance.

Water became the great resource of their agricultural enterprise: it was the fundamental element for rice cultivation, which the Pisani themselves introduced to the Lonigo area and which soon became the main source of their income, remaining so for centuries.

Over the following centuries the economic fortunes of the noble family were decidedly fluctuating. Between the late 1500s and the last quarter of the 1800s, phases of difficulty and greatness alternated (for example, in the mid-1700s the Bagnolo estate reached nearly 2,000 fields: it had never been so large). The nineteenth century was a hard century for all of Veneto, but the Bagnolo estate withstood the blow.

In 1874 Vettore Daniele died without having fathered a male heir: the Pisani family became extinct and the properties of Bagnolo and Lonigo passed to the noble Paduan family of De Lazara. The Pisani assets were inherited by Cornelia’s four children who, after initial joint management, opted for the separation of the immense patrimony. During the twentieth century much of the Pisani agricultural land was put up for sale, while the remaining assets passed from one heir to another up to the current situation: Palazzo Pisani has been owned by the Municipality of Lonigo since 1926; the villa at Bagnolo remained with the Pisani descendants until 1999, when it was sold to the Bedeschi-Bonetti family; the Rocca, the barchesse of Bagnolo and a large agricultural estate are currently managed by Count Pietro Leopoldo Ferri da Lazara, but when the male line of the Ferri counts becomes extinct, all properties will pass to the Order of Malta.

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