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Writer's picturePalladian Routes

Corte dei Roda Contrà S. Andrea


Corte dei Roda Contrà S. Andrea, so called due to the existence in medieval times of a small church dedicated to the saint. Someone wrote that above a garage in the street there remains, as evidence of the church, the carved bezel that overlooked the entrance door. I have searched a lot, but I have not had the luck of seeing it.

Unless the unknown informant was referring to a square image with a man's head that appears on the wall of a house at the end of the straight part of Contrà S. Andrea, where we are forced to turn left to enter the court of the Roda. In any case, the guide Barbieri Cevese Magagnato does not mention it. After passing the mighty stone portal of the Scamozziano palace of the Bergamo merchant family of Pizzioni called Roda due to the presence of a wheel in their coat of arms, we go out on the other side through the opposite entrance, equally imposing, of the building. Entry and exit have two different coats of arms. The palace no longer exists, there are only buildings built on the ruins; certainly some of the walls are original, and who knows if scratching the mortar you won't find some fragments of the frescoes by Giovanni Gualtieri known as de Mio, a citizen of Schio and of all of Italy, where he left admirable works in fresco and on canvas. I quote for all the frescoes in the Sauli chapel in S. Maria delle Grazie in Milan, adjacent to Leonardo's Supper. For the Vicentini, an "Adoration of the Magi" is visible in the municipal art gallery, where you can admire the painting technique used on that occasion (of the many he used, influenced by the best schools of the time), which is expressed through colors with metallic reflections. Leaving the other side, we continue to the end of the alley, skirting the Bacchiglione on the right and the old and smelly tannery on the left that remained in operation until the 1960s. Only then do I advise the visitor to turn around to admire the graceful sixteenth-century loggia that will appear to him, a romantic remnant of the palace overlooking the portal. The visitor who knows how to dream will seem to see, looking out from the loggia, a graceful blonde girl with a long braid, elegantly dressed. The picture will be completed by a young man under the loggia who sings the eternal song of love accompanying himself on the lute.





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