The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio by Witold Rybczynski Page B

specified that only lawful offspring could own the villa, the house was inherited by Pietro’s daughter Euriemma. Thus the villa passed to her husband’s family, the Caldognos (whose ancestor had also built a Palladio villa). A later Caldogno widow, Lucietta, who ran the estate for thirty years(1650–80), altered the east wing to provide rooms for her two sons. Lucietta’s descendants rented the house and fields to tenant farmers, and finally sold the property at auction in 1838. After changing hands several more times, the estate became a dairy farm, ceasing operation at the end of the Second World War. Housing was in short supply in postwar Italy, and the villa and its adjoining farm buildings were crudely subdivided and turned into a tenement, housing as many as thirty people. Thirty-five years later, abused and run into the ground, the villa was finally abandoned, and for fifteen years stood empty, at the mercy of the elements. The Landmark Trust bought the property and spent five years restoring the building. Since 1994, the Villa Saraceno has been occupied by scores of delighted visitors, judging from the comments in the guest book.
    I read this potted history in a scrapbook I found in the living room. The villa has a small library that includes several guidebooks, the inevitable Penguin edition of Death in Venice, and a beat-up paperback facsimile edition of Isaac Ware’s translation of Quattro libri. I set Thomas Mann aside for evening reading, and turn to the familiar pages of the famous treatise. It feels strange to be looking at a floor plan of the Villa Saraceno—as I sit inside the villa. Palladio listed Saraceno first among the villas belonging to “some gentlemen of the terraferma, ” perhaps because it was the smallest and simplest of his published designs. The house is about seventy-five feet long and fifty feet wide, half the size of the Villa Pisani, which Palladio had completed a few years earlier. The straightforward plan is simple but practical: a south-facing loggia leading to a sala with two rooms on each side, a small one in the front and a larger one in the rear. The two larger rooms—today the living room and dining room—are accessible directly from the sala, and lead to the smaller rooms. The smaller rooms are at the front of the house, butunlike the Villa Emo, they do not have doors leading to the loggia, which makes them both more private and warmer in the winter. The woodcut in Quattro libri shows the house facing a cortile formed by two impressive L-shaped barchesse with round dovecote towers at the corners, gay pennants at their peaks. “On each side there are all the necessary places for the use of a villa,” Palladio wrote. But that was wishful thinking—the noble cortile was never built. In the nineteenth century, influenced by a neoclassical revival, an owner added a barchessa approximating Palladio’s design, but since it was built only on the east side, it has left the house with an endearingly lopsided appearance. The barchessa connects the villa to several smaller outbuildings of medieval vintage that were part of the original farmyard.
    The room in which I’m working, on the east side of the sala, is the dining room. The first time we ate here was magical. It was the evening that we arrived, and we’d asked the custodian, Lorella Graham, to arrange to have dinner ready after we got in from the airport. We were still unpacking when a young couple showed up carrying boxes of groceries and started working in the kitchen. The food was simple, and delicious: a radicchio risotto, sautéed turkey breasts in a lemony sauce, a salad, and cooked pears. We ate at the long table by the flickering light of candles and the glow of the fire. Outside, the winter wind drove the rain against the closed window shutters. We felt like magnificent signori.
    This room is not exactly as Palladio designed it. Lucietta Caldogno made changes in the mid-seventeenth century, and a hundred years