Entering the main floor of the Rotonda one cannot help but notice the jubilation of frescoes and stuccos: the interior of the villa appears very different from what Palladio must have imagined, since each subsequent generation of owners brought new decorations in line with the fashion of its own era.

Outside, the walls had already been placed before 1570 statues on the spurs of the stairs, by the sculptor from Vicenza Lorenzo Rubini; only those in the south-west pronaos were replaced due to the damage suffered during the Austrian siege of 1848. In the early seventeenth century, however, the sculptures of male and female divinities were placed on the acroteria of the workshop of Giambattista Albanese, while those that stand out on the Scamozzian barchessa and along the surrounding wall that runs along the access avenue to the north-west are eighteenth-century, for some of which one can think of the workshop of Orazio Marinali, just as the group with is eighteenth century Hercules killing the Nemean lion in the garden nymphaeum.

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries they came the ceilings were frescoed of the four corner rooms and the dressing rooms on the main floor, as well as the domed vault: these are allegories of religion and virtues painted by Alessandro Maganza close to 1600, a painter of clear Veronese training. Only the corner room to the east is earlier, attributable to the hand of the Veronese Anselmo Canera.

The stucco they mainly belong to two distinct periods: the rich and imaginative ones from the late 16th century fireplace hoods, the stuccos of the ceilings (with interventions by Ottavio Ridolfi, Ruggero Bascapè, Domenico Fontana and perhaps Alessandro Vittoria) and of the dome (perhaps created by Agostino Rubini); while the sumptuous ones belong to the beginning of the 18th century over the door of the artists coming from Valsolda, so far from the Palladian order.

The intervention of the Valsoldian modellers is part of the great decorative campaign desired for the wedding of Marzio and Cecilia Capra, which also saw the fresco decoration of Louis Dorigny, a famous French painter who worked mainly in the Republic of Venice, on the walls of the central round room: here eight gigantic Olympic deities stand within an architecture tromp-l'oeil. The floor of this room is completed in the center by a mask bas-relief with a grotesque face.

La Rotonda is a world-famous icon, but for the Valmaranas it is also a home. The count Andrea Valmarana he bought it in very poor condition in 1912, living in it with his family in the summer months until the 1970s. During the Second World War it was partially occupied by the Germans and damaged by the explosion of numerous bombs that fell nearby.

In 1976 the greats began restorations conservative, all at the expense of the Property. In 1980 the Rotonda opened to the public, making the interior accessible six years later. In 1994 came the prestigious recognition ofUNESCO, the first Palladian monument to be declared a World Heritage Site, followed by the site "The city of Vicenza and Palladio's villas in Veneto".

Over the centuries the villa has been the destination of illustrious visits: scholars, artists, architects, men of letters, but also statesmen and rulers, such as the former King of England Edward VIII accompanied by his wife in 1936.

But the Rotonda is also well suited as movie set: you will remember the famous eighteenth-century costume scene filmed on the steps, in Don Giovanni by Joseph Losey from 1979.

The current Valmarana property intends to continue in the direction traced by Count Andrea, integrating architectural conservation with the desire to keep the Rotunda alive, not only a private residence but above all a precious asset to be handed over to future generations.

«Perhaps never has architectural art reached such a level of magnificence». Goethe visiting the Rotunda, September 1786.

The Rotunda, a unique in the same architectural production as Palladio, he had enormous success starting from the late sixteenth century (his first imitation, although with substantial modifications, is the Pisan Fortress built by Vincenzo Scamozzi around 1577), inspiring faithful copies and derivations up to the present day. Its structure, perfectly classic and modern at the same time, has made it auniversal icon of balance and harmony of proportions, a design model that soon went beyond the borders of Vicenza and Veneto.

During a trip to Italy at the beginning of the 17th century, the English architect Inigo Jones he was impressed by the Rotonda and Palladio's villas: it was he who brought the seed of the spread of the genre across the Channel Palladianism, which reached the height of its splendor with Lord Burlington in the eighteenth century, spread to the rest of Europe, to the Russia of the architects Quarenghi, Cameron and Rossi, up to the United States and its colonies.

Palladian architecture was perceived as the fruit of an era of high aesthetic and moral civilization: for this reason Palladio represented the ideal founder of the Independence of the new American states, until he was officially recognized "Father of American architecture" In 2010.

Thomas Jefferson, architect and third president of the United States, had well understood the ideological value of Palladian principles for the new nation and identified in the Rotunda a renewable construction model adaptable to different contexts. The most shining examples of American Palladianism are Jefferson's villa in Charlottesville (1770-1775) and the University of Virginia (1817-1825), with the Rotunda as an emblematic building of the campus; but the peculiar characteristics of Paolo Almerico's villa are still found, taken to the extreme, in the projects of the White House and the Capitol in Washington.

The universal lesson of the Rotonda also inspired the great architects of the 20th century: against the backdrop of Villa Savoye of Le Corbusier (1928-1931), so abstract and crystalline, one can still perceive the mathematical and geometric rigor of Palladio's symbolic villa.