If there were DNA for territories, it would confirm what we could have long suspected: that the land in northeastern Italy between the Alps and the Adriatic Sea, known today as the Veneto which was once a part of La Serenissima, the seafaring republic headed by Venice is a genetically endowed magnet for visitors.
It's easy to see what draws sixty million of them to the Veneto a year. Venice alone accounts for a greater proportion of these sightseers than it is comfortable with. Then there are the other art cities, the charming small towns, the wine country, the incomparable seafood, the thermal spas, the Adriatic beaches, the skiing in the Dolomites. With sixty million other tourists between you and all those marvels, you might wonder if there is anything pristine left for you to experience. Indeed there is. It is a special Italian gift that never grows stale: it is the gift for knowing how to shape the material world to create happiness.
The most visible and enduring shapes that harbor happiness in Italy are those of its private and public buildings. Their achievement is not necessarily one of grandeur, but rather of balance, harmony, clarity. Can there be a truer description of happiness? In the Veneto, those ideals find their purest architectural expression in the buildings designed some five hundred years ago by a stonemason's apprentice turned architect, Andrea Palladio.
Toward the end of an intensely productive life, Palladio published a treatise called I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura ("The Four Books of Architecture"), with detailed illustrations of the classical principles of harmony, balance and proportion that had guided his work. I Quattro Libri became an essential reference for architects from his day to ours. The St. Petersburg of the czars, Woburn Abbey, Monticello, the White House, the Southern Plantation style, a profusion of American libraries, schools and private houses: in all of them you find elements of a grammar of architecture formulated by Palladio.
You can experience for yourself how Palladio's rigorously deployed space can satisfy inner longings for balance and order by visiting one or more of the country villas he built for private clients. The most desirable one to spend time on would be one you can sleep close to, such as Villa Cornaro, in Piombino Dese. Piombino Dese is a plain-faced town of nine thousand souls in the Veneto farm country, less than an hour from Venice. In the year 1552, Giorgio Cornaro, the head of Venice's preeminent family, asked Palladio to build him a country seat in Piombino where he would preside over the planting and harvesting cycles of his farms.
