A stretch of the Venetian mainland as Palladio’s treatise orders it: villas set by the river and in the middle of their fields, each a temple-fronted house joined to its farm by barchesse; roads raised and lined with trees; and a small town whose piazza gathers the basilica, the loggia of the governor and the church.
Book II of the Quattro libri ends with the villa. It should stand by a navigable river if possible, or by a good road, on raised and healthy ground in the middle of its estate. The owner’s house sits at the centre, lifted on a basement so that the principal rooms are dry and look out over the fields, and fronted by a portico with a pediment, which Palladio believed the ancients had used on their houses. Long covered wings, the barchesse, join it to the stables, granaries and dovecotes, so that the owner can oversee everything under cover. The villas here are of four kinds Palladio built: the Rotonda with its four porticoes on a hill outside the town, a Foscari (Malcontenta) type facing the Brenta, an Emo type with straight wings, and a Badoer type whose wings curve forward like arms.
Book III turns to public works. Roads outside the city are straight, raised and planted with trees; streets inside are divided between a carriageway and raised footways and, in the Paduan way, lined with porticoes. The chief piazza, two parts broad to three long, gathers the buildings of government: a basilica wrapped in loggias of serliane, as at Vicenza, a loggia of the Venetian governor opposite it, palaces of the nobility, and a church raised on steps with Palladio’s interlocking temple fronts.
The fields are drawn with the rows of trees on which vines were trained, the piantata that still marks the Veneto plain.