The palace of the Brenta Riviera
Between Padua and Venice, along the Brenta canal, the Venetian patricians built from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century dozens of villas where they spent the summer and autumn "villeggiatura", moving here from the city by boat, aboard the burchiello, a comfortable passenger barge. The Riviera del Brenta became an open-air museum of about fifty villas, gardens and parks.
The most magnificent is Villa Pisani at Stra, called "the queen of the Venetian villas". It was built in the eighteenth century for the Pisani family, when Alvise Pisani became doge, and has 114 rooms: Napoleon bought it in 1807, and later it hosted the Habsburgs and the first meeting between Mussolini and Hitler in 1934. Its masterpiece is the ballroom ceiling frescoed by Giambattista Tiepolo with the Glory of the Pisani family. The huge park has a long reflecting pool, the stables, an orangery, a coffee house on a mound and a famous hedge maze, one of the most complex in the world, with a tower at its centre. Other villas worth visiting are Villa Widmann and Villa Foscarini Rossi.
Tip: in season, modern versions of the burchiello sail along the Brenta between Padua and Venice, stopping at the main villas.
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