Northern Italy Trip, Days 5 & 6: Verona & Vicenza

After leaving Venice, we stopped for a few hours in Verona.


Piazza delle Erbe

Known as the setting of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Verona is also home to two more of Carl Scarpa's works: the Banco Populare Verona facade and the renovations to the Castelvecchio Museum. We spent some time at each of these during our brief visit, sketching, analyzing, and admiring all the details that were everywhere in Scarpa's work.

Hanging stairs up to a tower at Castelvecchio

Ponte Scaligero from Castelvecchio

In the afternoon, we left Verona for Vicenza. Vicenza is the site of much of Palladio's architecture, which we toured both as a group and on our own. For me, the biggest highlight of our stay in Vicenza was finally getting to see Palladio's Villa Rotunda, another one of the quintessential architectural precedents that are always referenced in our design textbooks and classes. 

Villa Rotunda

The villa was actually much smaller than I thought it would be, but it was really interesting to study all of the ways Palladio broke his own rules in its design. For instance, La Rotunda, which we always studied in class as a bilaterally symmetrical building isolated on a landscaped hill, actually has one slightly dominant axis and rests even higher on the hill upon a plinth.

Villa Rotunda Sketch

We spent the rest of the day seeing and sketching the other Palladian buildings sprinkled throughout the city. 

Basilica Palladiana

One of the coolest things we saw was Palladio's Teatro Olimpico. The theater has 5 aisles on the stage that create forced-perspective street scenes for performances. The actors would walk onstage down the realistic-looking street alleys, instead of just out from behind a curtain--such an interesting concept!

Teatro Olimpico Forced-Perspective Scenery