When: 10.00 am to 6.00 pm (July 1st to August 31st), 9.00 am to 5.00 pm (September 1st to June 30th); closed on Monday.
Where: Piazza Giacomo Matteotti, 3, Vicenza.
Distance from Residence La Mason: 27 km, 27 minutes.
Visiting Palazzo Chiericati
Palazzo Chiericati was built in 1550 by Andrea Palladio by the will of Girolamo Chiericati. Palladio died in 1580 and, following the indications that the great architect had left in his treatise The four books of architecture, the palace was completed in 1680.
Among all the Palladian buildings, Palazzo Chiericati certainly stands out for its unusual nature, which makes it unique: even if it is included in a urban context, the palace recalls in some ways a suburban villa. In fact, it has large symmetrical loggias on the sides of the central body and, due to the frequent floods that hit the city, the building is raised on a majestic staircase that reminds an ancient temple.
The interior of the building is certainly worth a visit: both the ground floor and the noble floor are decorated with precious frescoes, canvases with mythological subject and precious stuccoes made in the 16th and 17th century. But the amazement continues also in the basement, where you can visit the rooms formerly reserved for servants, such as kitchens and cellars.
In 1994, the building was acknowledge as a World Heritage site by UNESCO.
Today Palazzo Chiericati is the civic art gallery and, in addition to hosting several temporary exhibitions, it offers visitors a large number of masterpieces, the result of nineteenth-century bequests. It is in fact possible to admire a collection of Palladio’s drawings, altarpieces and paintings by Tintoretto, Veronese, Van Dyck, Memling, Tiepolo and many other masters. The legacy of the Vicentine partisan and writer Neri Pozza, on the other hand, donated to the palace sculptures and engravings by Pozza himself, along with works by Carlo Carrà, Osvaldo Licini, Gino Severini, Arturo Martini and Pablo Picasso. Eventually, thanks to a donation in 2012, the art gallery also acquired works by Manet, Pisarro, Boldini, Pisanello, Garofalo and Canaletto.
Information for visitors
The full ticket costs € 7.00 and the reduced ticket is € 5.00. Admission is free for children up to 17 years, people with disabilities and their carers.
It is also possible to rent audioguides, available in Italian, English and German and costing € 5.00.
For more information, please visit the official website.
