MuseumsThe Venetian Villas
heritage of an exciting historical period and of a lively territory
Often, still today, Venetian Villas represents the heart of the activities of a territory, with their tourist activities tied to the hospitality, to the ristorazione and the congress activity. But today they are often the cultural center of their territory, like beautiful museums that give hospitality to the most representative works of the Venetian Rinascimento that conditioned the European culture for centuries. Many of these Villas have been recognized world-wide patrimony by the Unesco and are opened to the public with high level exhibitions. On the inside there are the frescoes and the pictures of the most important representatives of the Rinascimento or integral testimonies of the peasant civilization that lived around them. For example, Villa Godi Malinverni, the first Palladio’s Villa, is a museum , in which the splendid Zelotti’s frescoes, the precious furnishings of epoch, the Marinali’s animated statues can be admired, but it is also a rifornitissimo Natural History Museum, with the largest fossil palm in the world. In Villa Emo, another Palladio’s work, it is possible to cover long halls transformed in museum of peasants’ arts. In other Villas, there are rich collections of the wines that rendered Veneto famous in the world or real little markets of the antique trade (veri e propri). So the Villas not only become witnesses or protagonists of the history, but also of the custom.
The Castles
The opportunity for being able to live again the court spirit...
Few people know that in Veneto there are hundreds of castles, evidence of an intense and rich historical past of significant changes. From the Longobardi to the Signorie, the Serenissima Republic to the Austrianhungarian domination the castles have represented wealth and power and around them many legends were born, handed on orally in the traditional “filò”, moments of evening encounters in which the most important moments of people and the country were lived again. The greater part of them today is opened to the public and inside it has, like coffers, important testimonies of their ages. They are museums in which the ancient coats of arms of the nobiliar lineages, the yellowed medieval manuscripts, the heavy crews, the sparkling armors used by the knights of that age and the Middle Ages typical tools of the daily life make to live again the ancient courts’ atmosphere. Periodically, in some castles they are made to live again fundamental historical moments for the history of the territory being made to admire splendid customs of age to the astonished tourists, charlatan of court, moving jugglers and acrobats. During the Palio in custom, the castle is filled up of the voices, of smells and colors of a past that is still alive and present.
