The Accademia Galleries have just opened a whole new section, six rooms along the splendid Palladian loggia, an extraordinary architectural space that not many people know about.
Andrea, as we know, like Proto, does not even create a public work in Venice.
Not the Rialto Bridge, not the reconstruction of the Doge's Palace after the fire: nothing to be done.
However, he is the architect of the families linked to the ecclesiastical world: here are the wonderful churches, such as S. Giorgio and the Redentore which create a precious scenography, perfect white jewels above a large field of water, slightly moved as the green countryside does under the villas in the hinterland.
Here, however, everything is abstract, perhaps we are dreaming, or rather we are awake but aware of being awake in a dreamlike dimension.
But there are not only the churches of Palladio in Venice.
Another masterpiece is here, inside the Gallerie dell'Accademia, in what was the monastery of the Lateran Canons, also called the Convent of Charity.
An ambitious project, in which once again there is the opportunity to study and invent something never seen before: the re-proposal of a Roman domus, based solely on Vitruvius' description, as always with license to go further.
Here are the words of the Architect in the Four Books: «I tried to resemble this house to those of the Ancients: and therefore I built the Corinthian Atrium…» - he is talking about an open atrium, which leads to the peristyle with three orders of arches.
This is how Canaletto, two centuries later, represented it in the view requested by the English consul Joseph Smith.
As it should have been, precisely on the basis of the description in the Four Books, as well as on what today remains of this new majestic monument, only partially built and partially destroyed by a fire a few decades after its construction.
A giant Roman domus, all facing inwards, all red except for the stone bases and capitals.
Containing a work of art in itself: an extraordinary spiral staircase, which however deserves its own space.
To find out more, here is a tour of Palladio in Venice