Villa Valmarana ai Nani is a historic residence, counted among the happiest examples of decoration of the Venetian Villas, the country homes of the nobles of the Serenissima: holiday resorts but also the fulcrum of the economic system of the Venetian Republic.
The historical and social value of Villa Valmarana is crowned by an inestimable artistic testimony: inside the two buildings called Palazzina and Foresteria, that constitute the complex, ,lies the apex of civil painting decoration of the eighteenth century (1757).
The master of Venetian painting Giambattista Tiepolo, together with his promising son Giandomenico and the faithful quadraturista Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna created
eight hundred square meters of frescoes, divided into 12 rooms and two different buildings (the Palazzina and the Foresteria), unique for their stylistic and interpretative freedom. .
The stylistic comparison between Gianbattista Tiepolo and his son Giandomenico Tiepolo becomes an unprecedented analysis of the two faces of eighteenth-century European painting: a chiasmus that contrasts the courtly tones and bright colors of the painting of the more famous “Tiepoletto” and the decadent charm of carnival and popular figures by Giandomenico.
The Iliad and the Aeneid, Orlando Furioso and the Jerusalem Liberated are the subjects of the frescoes in the Palazzina where the greatest epic and chivalric poems are evoked, The theater of Carlo Goldoni, the charm of the East, of the Carnival and of the English Neo-Gothic outline the features of the frescoes in the Foresteria.
A unique geographical position gives the historic home of the Valmarana family a bucolic aura: the perimeter of the villa is in fact located on the small peak of Colle di San Bastian, a modest hill just outside the center of Vicenza.
Each window is dominated by the view of the gentle slopes of the pristine ‘Valletta of silence’, the city center hidden by the vegetation and the morphology of the mountain.
