Villa Cornaro

Piombino Dese, Italy

Exterior only

Visible from the street; the inside is private.

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Villa Cornaro, located in Piombino Dese about 30 kilometers northwest of Venice, is a patrician villa designed by Andrea Palladio in 1552 and built in 1553. As a masterpiece of Palladian architecture, it exemplifies the Renaissance principles that would define the architect's influential legacy. Palladio himself illustrated and described the villa in Book Two of his seminal 1570 treatise, *I quattro libri dell'architettura* (*The Four Books on Architecture*), cementing its status as a canonical work whose formal vocabulary influenced architecture for centuries to come. The villa is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, though its preservation history has been marked by changes in ownership beyond state control.