Discover Villa Valmarana ai Nani

Two low buildings on a hillside outside Vicenza — a main house and a long guest wing, the Foresteria — joined by a walled garden whose parapet carries seventeen stone dwarfs. Inside, almost every wall and ceiling of both buildings is frescoed edge to edge, so the rooms are small and the painted surfaces are continuous.

The buildings themselves are deliberately unremarkable: plain plastered walls, simple proportions, nothing that would detain an architectural historian for long. That is worth knowing before arriving, because the contrast is the point -- this is not a Palladian showpiece but an ordinary house carrying extraordinary painting.

The Palazzina, the main house, has seven frescoed rooms by Giambattista, each given over to a single literary source and each treated as an architectural illusion: painted colonnades and skies that extend the small rooms outward.

The Foresteria, the guest wing, is Giandomenico's, and its rooms are lower, lighter and full of people rather than gods. The Chinese room and the carnival room are the ones people remember.

Along the garden wall stand the seventeen stone dwarves that give the villa its name.