Villa Zeno

Donegal di Cessalto Treviso (1554 ?) The dating of the project for the Villa Zeno at Cessalto — one of the least known and certainly the easternmost (geographically speaking) of Palladio’s villas — is uncertain. Recent hypotheses have fixed the date to 1554, which is to say right after Marco Zeno’s acquisition of the estate of Cessalto, a dating quite compatible with its evident formal affinities with other villas of the same period like Saraceno and Caldogno.
Certainly an autograph design, the villa was published in the Quattro Libri with added large right-angle barchesse, which were not actually realised until the first decades of the seventeenth century. Without doubt Palladio’s scheme remodelled a pre-existing building, and this fact might explain some of the peculiarities of the plan. Heavily modified over the course of the centuries, the villa no longer displays its original thermal window which was bricked up in the eighteenth century.

View (photo Sutto 1999)
 

Front view (photo Sutto 1999)
 

Façade (photo Sutto 1999)
 

Plan (Bertotti Scamozzi 1781)
 

Section (Bertotti Scamozzi 1781)