Architectural Significance
Villa Saraceno has been dated to the 1540s, which makes it one of Andrea Palladio's earlier works. In 1570 the building was illustrated in an imagined state in its architect's influential publication "Four Books of Architecture". However, the villa had been constructed in a more modest form, and existing farm buildings were retained rather than being replaced by the architect's "trade-mark" wings. The reasons for the divergence between the published plan and the actual building are not entirely clear, but it is not the only one of Palladio's villas to be different from the published plan.
The villa is one of Palladio's simpler creations. Like most of Palladio's villas it combines living space for its upper-class owners with space for uses related to agriculture. Above the "piano nobile" is a floor which was designed as a granary. As it stands today, the villa has a nineteenth-century wing which links it to a fifteenth-century building.
Read more about this topic: Villa Saraceno
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