Day Trips from Venice, Venice, Italy

Vicenza is an hour drive from Venice and worth touring if time permits. The city in a UNESCO World Heritage Site and features many works of Andrea Palladio, a 16th Century Renaissance architect who defined the Palladian Style. Palladio’s buildings are marked with bi-lingual signs, thus it is easy to tour the town in search of his architecture. Two places designed by Palladio that we visited were the Olympic Theater and Villa Capra (la Rotunda).

I highly recommend taking a tour of the Olympic Theater. I found the interior to be spectacular and think it would be incredible to see a show here despite the wood bench seats topped with red cushions on performance nights.

Behind the stage curtains is an intricately painted set of wood and stucco that looks like Vicenza’s main street named for Palladio. The set is built in a perspective to look very long, but it isn’t. While actors and actresses could walk through the set behind the stage in a play, it is so old and fragile that it is not put into use. Regardless, it is one of the coolest theaters I have ever seen.

Villa Capra, the inspiration for Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, is located southeast of Vicenza. The Villa was originally constructed for a bishop, Paolo Almerico, who retired from the Vatican and returned to his home town. The building itself was inspired by the Pantheon. Twenty years later it was purchased by the noble Capra family for which it is named. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).