The Barchesse of Villa Badoer in Fratta Polesine have an unusual shape: we could define it as an embrace shape. In fact, they start from the body of the building and curve gently in the direction of those arriving. Palladio probably wanted to repeat what in Villa Trissino di Meledo di Sarego he had proposed only in the project, a much larger and more striking embrace, considering the expected dimensions (the project was carried out only in a small part, excluding, among other things, also the embracing colonnade).
But we know that this project was known by the cultural world of the time, because it was included in the "Four books of architecture" by the Master. Bernini Gianlorenzo, the great architect, when he thought of the famous colonnade in St. Peter's Square in Rome, around the middle of the seventeenth century, adopted the embrace shape, signifying the welcoming invitation of the church to the faithful and at the same time the invitation to faithful to embrace the faith of Christ, while in the other two cases contemplated it was a question of showing the hospitality and welcome of the hosts towards the guests. Bernini was not alone in designing, because his client, Pope Alexander VII Chigi, was highly competent and passionate about architecture, so the project was born from two exceptional intelligences who certainly referred to our Palladio, of whom it is thought they had read " The Four Books ". But Luigi Vanvitelli (Van Wittel), when he received the commission from Charles of Bourbon for the Royal Palace of Caserta, did he design the enveloping colonnade himself or did he use the teachings of his two (three including Alexander VII) predecessors? It was then in the mid-eighteenth century, so about two hundred years after Palladio and one hundred after Bernini. Impossible that an architectural genius like Vanvitelli did not know, and even well, the works of the first two. So we can hypothesize that Palladio was certainly the first master of this architectural typology. On the other hand, there are so many testimonies throughout the world that refer to Palladio that the one proposed in this short piece, even if it has an interesting peculiarity, goes almost unnoticed. Lucio Panozzo
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