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Valmarana Braga Palace

Valmarana Braga Palace is a palace built by the architect Andrea Palladio in 1565 and located in Vicenza, in corso Fogazzaro.

It is included in the list of 23 Palladian monuments of the city which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The foundation medal of the building bears the date 1566 and the profile of Isabella Nogarola Valmarana, and it is the latter who signs the construction contracts with the masons in December 1565.

However, there is no doubt about the role played by her late husband Giovanni Alvise (who died in 1558) in choosing Palladio as the designer of the family palace. With Girolamo Chiericati, and of course Giangiorgio Trissino, in 1549 Valmarana had publicly supported Palladio's project for the Loggias of the Basilica, evidently on the basis of an estimate born six years earlier, when Giovanni Alvise oversaw the construction of the ephemeral apparatuses in honor of entry into Vicenza of the bishop Niccolò Ridolfi (1543), designed by Palladio under the direction of Trissino.

And a Palladian space, the Valmarana chapel in the church of Santa Corona, will host the mortal remains of Giovanni Alvise and Isabella, commissioned by their son Leonardo.

On the site then occupied by the new sixteenth-century palace, the Valmarana family had owned building properties since the end of the fifteenth century, which were gradually merged to form the object of the Palladian restructuring.

The planimetric irregularity of the rooms undoubtedly derives from the crooked course of the façade and of the pre-existing walls. In this sense, it is evident how the Olympic regularity of the palace plan presented in the Four Books of Architecture (Venice, 1570) is the result of the usual theoretical Palladian abstraction, especially since the extension of the palace beyond the square courtyard was not never built, but apparently not even sought after by Leonardo Valmarana, who appears to acquire neighboring properties rather than continue with the construction of the family palace.

During the Second World War, on March 18, 1945, the building suffered heavy damage due to an Allied bombing that destroyed the roof, part of the attic and most of the main hall on the noble floor.

The façade, on the other hand, remained intact and is still one of the rare examples that retain its original plaster and marble finish. In 1960 the ruined palace was sold by the Valmarana family to Vittor Luigi Braga Rosa, who carried out extensive restorations, rebuilding the parts demolished in the war and enriching the palace with decorations and works of art from other destroyed buildings, among which the collection stands out. of seventeenth-century canvases by Giulio Carpioni with a mythological subject.

Map: Valmarana Braga Palace