There is no certain documentary testimony to the original layout of Villa Emo’s garden apart from a brief description by Palladio himself in his famous treatise The Four Books on Architecture, where the architect states: Behind this building there is a square garden measuring eighty campi Trevigiani: in the middle a little river flows and makes the place very beautiful and enjoyable. Unfortunately in this brief description he does not give any details regarding the planting,

In 1731 Giovanni Emo commissioned the measuring, listing and description of all the land he owned near Piombino, Fanzolo and neighbouring sites to the agricultural engineer Angelo Gattolini from Treviso. At present there is still a very big map of the massive work carried out, kept in the Emo-Capodilista’s archive at the villa which refers to the property owned by the Emo family at Fanzolo and the registration of the same. While the first one is a bird’s eye view of the famil

The third chapter on the evolution of Villa Emo’s garden is dated 1868. A file of few pages for that year is kept in the Emo Capodilista’s archive bearing the significant title: A project for a garden and for soil drying, and inside it was The garden project by Cav. Negrin from Vicenza. The representation of the whole General Plan of the new gardens annexed to the villa in Fanzolo, owned by the very noble Emo Capodilista’s family, is the work of the civil architect Antonio Ca

Some photographs from the first years of the 1900s reveal how the garden, designed by Arch. Negrin, evolved. The 1900 photo by A. Charvet, published in the magazine Emporium and accompanying an article called A Venetian nobleman’s villa (La villa di un patrizio veneto) by Molmenti, shows the villa seen from the west barchessa. We can see that the west orangery is no longer there. In its place a large lawn or perhaps the oval flowerbed designed by Negrin for the symmetrical ga

Like in Villa Barbaro in Maser, which is of the same period and not very far, the pediment’s gable in Villa Emo is decorated by the sculptor from the Trentino region, Alessandro Vittoria. The approach of the sculptor for Villa Barbaro, is very different to that for Villa Emo. At Villa Barbaro the sculptor opted for a majestic solution outside the geometric and spatial canons, probably on request of the learned owners, the brothers Daniele and Marcantonio Barbaro, with two sig

The collocation of the sculptures in the front garden of Villa Emo, dates back to the 1920s. This thesis is supported by the considerations regarding the inheritance when Venier took over from Carlo Emo-Capodilista in 1921. Among the assets inherited by the latter there is Villa Contarini-Venier in Vò Euganeo and the statues that adorned this villa’s garden reached Fanzolo between 1921 and 1925 to embellish the garden. The sculptures dating back to the 16th century and by unk

The winged Victories and the statues in the garden are not the only sculptures in Villa Emo. Part of this decorative sector is the wooden coat of arms which is located on the northern wall in the central hall and covers the third window that used to illuminate the place. The coat of arms was once placed on the transom of Angelo Emo’s flagship (1731-1792), the last great Capitano da Mar of the Serenissima Republic. The enormous wooden sculpture, about two metres wide and two a

The positioning of Villa Emo in the wider property is based on two directions that are perpendicular to each other, a horizontal one which is the villa itself and a vertical one which is the path leading to the villa, originally completely tree-lined with poplars, which in the XVI century represented an important road sign for passing travellers in the land of the Emo family. From the architectural point of view the central body in the villa façade immediately stands out. It

The barchesse, that is the two long porticoed side wings which start from the main body of the villa, are at the core of the agricultural company: they are two identical blocks, each with eleven big rounded arches. In Palladio’s design, visible in his treatise, The Four Books on Architecture, the eleven arches on each side only join the Villa perspectively because in actual fact the lateral bodies and the central one are separated by the measurement of three spans. Palladio c

The existence of a place of worship in the building by Andrea Palladio is rather confused and controversial. The scholar Donata Battilotti has tried to shed some light on it. An ambiguous testimony is provided by the pastoral visits paid by the Bishop of Treviso to Fanzolo in 1564 and in 1567. During the latter in fact, on the 2nd of May, the oratory of the villa was consecrated, which indicates that on the previous visit the oratory had not been built or finished yet. Howeve