Fire, flames, smoke: a burning of forbidden tomes. The time is that of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, its protagonists are the heretics and their heresies.
The Veneto at that time was crushed in the grip of the spiritual conflict between Luther's Germany and papal Rome... The swarming of a non-Catholic religious community in this region was becoming remarkable, and cities like the capital of the Serenissima were revealed venues for the penetration of ideas in favor of the Reformation. The Lutheran theses were gaining ground thanks to the brand new printing works that began to spread throughout the Veneto region.
From Germanic soil, in Veneto cities as well as Vicenza, came the ideas of Calvinist, as well as Lutheran matrix. In fact, Vicenza could be defined as a "heretical" city in all respects.
Meanwhile, in 1524, in the heart of San Pietro in Castello in Venice, there was the first burning of forbidden books wanted by the Holy See. In Rovigo, where the Protestant matrix was innervated on the profound intolerance nurtured by the local patrician class for the Venetian administration, perceived as exaggeratedly oppressive, the situation was very different from that of Venice.
Notable Vicentine patricians, such as the Trissino and Thiene, were forced to flee, while others cultivated their conversion to the Reformation in secrecy. Even today it is believed that those aristocratic families tried to make their sympathy for the Reformation implicitly evident through construction and, most likely, the Palladian villas themselves would indicate a clear adherence to the reformed tendencies that were then spread from Switzerland to Germany. The villas that Andrea Palladio built for many of his "heretics" patrons are scattered throughout Veneto area and those suburban summer residences that gravitate around Vicenza are a perfect example of this aristocratic escape.
Anyone wishing to savor with their pupils the legacy of this escape, of this noble refuge, is invited to lift the veil of magnificence and to rediscover the villas that lie along the paths of these our itineraries.
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