A villa acquired, then transformed by fresco
Villa Valmarana ai Nani stands in the countryside on the edge of Vicenza, close to the city whose skyline and public buildings were shaped by the architect Andrea Palladio in the sixteenth century. Its main building dates from the mid-seventeenth century; the Valmarana family, a noble Vicenza household, acquired the property in 1720. It was Giustino Valmarana who, decades later, commissioned the decoration that made the villa famous, engaging Giambattista Tiepolo and his son Giandomenico to fresco its interiors during an intense burst of work in 1757, a commission that brought the era's most sought-after decorative painter to a relatively modest suburban villa rather than a grand city palace.
The legend of the dwarves
The villa's name, 'ai Nani' ('of the dwarves'), comes from a set of stone statues of dwarves that line its boundary wall. According to a local legend, the family's daughter, who had dwarfism, was kept within the villa's grounds to shield her from the outside world, and statues of dwarves were placed around the property so that she would not feel alone in her stature; when a prince entered the garden and she realised her condition, she is said to have thrown herself from a tower in despair, and the statues turned to stone from grief. The story is unverified as history, but it remains closely associated with the villa and its sculptures, and it is retold to nearly every visitor who passes the wall on the way to the entrance.
Two painters, two buildings
The villa comprises two structures: the Palazzina, the main residence, and the Foresteria, built to house guests. In the Palazzina, Giambattista Tiepolo painted grand mythological and literary scenes drawn from the Iliad, the Aeneid, Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata, using illusionistic perspective to open the rooms onto scenes of heroes and gods. In the Foresteria, his son Giandomenico worked in a more intimate, everyday register, painting scenes of popular festivals, Commedia dell'Arte figures and chinoiserie; the Stanza dei Pagliacci and the Stanza del Carnevale are among the best known of these rooms, offering a marked contrast to the epic register of the Palazzina and showing the range of a single artistic family working side by side under one roof.
Villa Valmarana ai Nani today
The villa remains in the ownership of the Valmarana family and is open to the public, allowing visitors to see both fresco cycles alongside each other. Beyond the frescoed interiors, the formal Italian gardens and surrounding park offer views over Vicenza and the nearby Sanctuary of Monte Berico, and the villa continues to host cultural events, concerts and exhibitions, keeping the two fresco cycles in active use rather than as a sealed period display.