Put the owner’s house at the centre and join the farm buildings to it with covered porticoes (barchesse), so that one can go everywhere under cover; give granaries, cellars, stables and threshing floor their proper places, in proportion to the estate.
Where to build a villa
Build the country house by a navigable river if you can, for cheap transport of the harvest and for beauty, or else by a main road; on raised ground open to the air, away from standing water and deep valleys, and in the middle of its own land.
Palladio wanted the villa in the middle of its estate so that the owner could oversee all of it and bring in the harvest easily. A river gives transport, water for the gardens and the animals, and freshness in summer, and it is a pleasure to look at. Low ground and stagnant water bring fevers, and a villa in a deep valley is shut in and gets poor air.
The villas along the Brenta between Padua and Venice, such as the Malcontenta, were reached from Venice by boat, and their fronts faced the water.
Related rules
Make the streets of a city straight and wide enough for their traffic; pave the middle for carts and animals and raise the sides a little for people on foot, and where the climate is hot or wet, line them with porticoes so that citizens go about their business under cover.
Make the roads outside a city straight, broad and raised above the fields, and plant trees along both sides, to shade the traveller and delight the eye.
Leave piazzas in several parts of the city for markets and assembly, the principal one in the middle; ring it with porticoes, and set round it the palace of the prince or the signoria, the treasury, the prisons and the basilica where justice is done, with the principal church close by.
breadth : length = 2 : 3 (the Latin forum)
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Where to build a villa”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/palladio-villa-site. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.