Palladian Basilica
— green copper riding above the white arches.
Not only on a wall.
“Andrea Palladio was forty when Vicenza handed him a problem: a Gothic council hall whose newer stone shell had collapsed at one corner. His answer was to wrap the old building in white marble arcades, each round arch flanked by a pair of narrower openings, the figure the rest of Europe would copy and call the Palladian window. Above it sits a roof of copper gone soft green, shaped like the upturned hull of a ship. People still climb to the terrace at dusk for an aperitivo, the square going quiet below them.
Palladian Basilica, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Basilica Palladiana stands on Piazza dei Signori, the central square of Vicenza, a city of about 110,000 on the Veneto plain in north-eastern Italy, roughly halfway between Verona and Venice. It is an older Gothic council hall, the Palazzo della Ragione, rebuilt: in 1546 the city's Council of One Hundred gave the commission to Andrea Palladio, then forty, and work on the new marble shell began in April 1549. Palladio named it a basilica after the civic halls of ancient Rome. Since 1994 it has belonged to the UNESCO World Heritage Site City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto, which also covers the Teatro Olimpico and the Villa La Rotonda nearby.
Both arcade levels are built in white marble, wrapped around the surviving Gothic core like a new skin over an old frame. The signature element is the serliana, later known the world over as the Palladian window: a round arch flanked by a pair of narrower rectangular openings. Palladio varied the width of those side openings so the rhythm could absorb the irregular bays of the medieval building underneath, a quiet engineering trick that lets the façade read as perfectly even. The first arcade was standing by 1561; the upper order, begun in 1564, was finished in 1597, seventeen years after Palladio's death in 1580.
The hall is open Tuesday to Sunday, generally from 10 in the morning to 6 in the evening, with last entry half an hour before closing; Mondays are kept for maintenance. Inside is the Salone, a single unsupported room roughly 52 by 22 metres, used now for exhibitions and civic events. Above it runs the building's other defining line: a roof of oxidised copper, gone soft green with age and shaped like the upturned hull of a ship. A terrace beneath that roof opens in the evening for an aperitivo, with the rooftops of Vicenza and the Torre Bissara, the 82-metre clock tower next door, close enough to touch.