Villa Barbaro Iis a Venetian villa, built by Andrea Palladio between 1554 and 1560 for Daniele Barbaro, and his brother Marcantonio Barbaro, ambassador of the Republic of Venice, transforming the old medieval palace owned by the family into a splendid country house suitable for the study of the arts and intellectual contemplation, decorated with a cycle of frescoes that represents one of Paolo Veronese's masterpieces.At the beginning of the 1550s, the construction of the villa for the Barbaro brothers in Maser was an important point of arrival for Palladio in defining the new type of country building. For the first time (although the solution has precedents in fifteenth-century villas) the manor house and the barchesse are aligned in a compact architectural unit. In Maser this is probably to be linked to the particular location of the villa on the slopes of a hill: the linear arrangement guaranteed better visibility from the road below, and moreover the orography of the land would have imposed expensive terraces with barchesse arranged according to the course of the slope.In the construction of the villa Palladio intervened with skill, managing to transform a pre-existing house by hooking it to the rectilinear barchesse and digging a nymphaeum with a fish pond on the wall of the hill from which, thanks to a sophisticated hydraulic system, the water is transported to the service rooms and then reaches the gardens and orchard.
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