Day 21 Saturday 7th June 2008

This morning we drove down to a market at Ponte di Barbarano. It was a small market with few stalls, but there were 2 reasonable fruit stalls, so we bought some fruit.

This afternoon we drove north east to visit 2 Palladian villas. Villa Emo and Villa Cornaro are both villas designed by Andrea Palladio and both illustrate his general ideas on design, style and layout. Internal decoration is quite different as they were built for different clients who had differing requirements and employed different interior designers. Villa Emo was built for a working estate and farm and consequently is set in the middle of barns, threshing floors and other outbuildings. It is very well decorated internally with frescoes and painting including mock columns in the main hall and other rooms. Villa Cornaro was left mostly white paint internally when built but later owners had some decoration added – Old Testament scenes downstairs and New Testament upstairs. They were both beautiful villas but anyone wanting to change decoration occasionally should not have frescoes.

We returned to Palazzo Rosso through floods; we had seen the lightning and heard the thunder but did not experience much rain. Others obviously did.

Start Mileage  13402		Finish 13498		Miles travelled = 96
								Total Miles = 2013

Day 22 Sunday 8th June 2008

Today was much warmer and sunnier. We went to Piazzola sul Brenta to visit Villa Contarini, a Palladian style villa built about the same time as Palladio was operating. The wings either side of the central villa were added about a century later. Also later was the connecting villa between one of the wings and the semi-circular range of music buildings and dwellings. We had to join a guided tour in Italian but after the tour we looked at rooms that we had missed and also the gardens. The gardens at the villas in Italy are nothing like the ones at the chateaux in France with a few exceptions.

We returned to the Palazzo Rosso for lunch and later sat out in the sun by the new swimming pool. We also ventured into the water, being the first ever paying guests to use the pool. The only people before us were the owner and his family. The sun today was warm and burning – a certain female of our acquaintance ended up quite red in places. 

After dinner and a bike ride around the fields we sat outside with another couple, who arrived here on Saturday, talking and drinking.
 
Start Mileage 13498			Finish 	13529		Miles travelled = 31
								Total miles = 2044