Discover Villa La Rotonda

The plan is a circle inside a square, with four identical projecting porticoes on the axes -- the only Palladian villa built with all four. Each portico carries six Ionic columns and a pediment, reached by a broad flight of steps.

The reason for the symmetry is the site. The villa sits on a knoll with open country in every direction, so there is no principal view to face and no road frontage to address: every side is the front. Palladio wrote that he gave it loggias on all four sides precisely because all four aspects deserved one.

Inside, the four entrances converge on a central circular hall rising the full height into a dome, frescoed in trompe-l'oeil to dissolve the ceiling into sky. The temple front applied to a house was, in the 1560s, a genuine provocation: it borrowed the language of the sacred for domestic use, and every neoclassical mansion since has followed.