In 1546 the Council of One Hundred of Vicenza opened a new chapter for the city’s main civic building, the 15th-century Palazzo della Ragione attributed to Domenico da Venezia, a Gothic communal hall whose external loggias had partially collapsed in the decades before. Sansovino, Sanmicheli and Giulio Romano had already been consulted; the commission was eventually awarded to Andrea Palladio, then a local architect in his late thirties. Work on the new envelope began in 1549, and Palladio received a modest monthly stipend from the city for most of the rest of his life. This was his first major public commission and the one that fixed his name on the urban fabric of Vicenza: the medieval hall was preserved inside, while the outer skin was rebuilt as a Renaissance basilica in the antique sense of a public, columned civic building.

Palladio’s solution organises every bay of the building around a single architectural device, the serliana: a central round arch carried on slender columns and flanked by two narrower rectangular openings. The lower loggia uses the Doric order, the upper loggia the Ionic, in the canonical Renaissance superposition. The repeating module absorbs the irregularities of the underlying medieval geometry — no two bays of the old palace had identical widths — and turns them into a calm, modular rhythm in pale Costozza stone. The serliana would later be picked up by Inigo Jones and Lord Burlington in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, and become one of the most copied motifs of European Palladianism, from country houses to civic buildings.

The west façade on Piazza delle Erbe was completed only in 1614, thirty-four years after Palladio’s death, so that the project lasted approximately sixty-five years from commission to completion. Covering the whole complex is a great wooden roof shaped like an inverted ship’s hull, sheltering the 52 × 22 metre Salone of the medieval Palazzo della Ragione below. Between 2007 and 2012 the building underwent a major restoration that included the reconstruction of the roof covering in copper; the project received the European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Award in 2014. The Basilica is today managed by Musei Civici di Vicenza as a venue for temporary exhibitions and civic events, and is inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage list as part of “City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto”, listed in 1994.