Basilica Palladiana

Vicenza's medieval town hall, the Palazzo della Ragione, had begun to collapse when the city council held a competition in 1546 to save it; Palladio, then a local stonemason's son turned architect in his late thirties, won by proposing not a replacement but a wrap. Behind his new facade the old Gothic hall survives essentially intact, its irregular structural bays hidden by a screen of white Istrian stone loggias, Doric below and Ionic above, in which a wide arched opening is paired with two narrow flat-headed ones on each side — a motif Palladio did not invent but used here so consistently that it is still called the Serliana or the Palladian window. The commission cost the city roughly 60,000 ducats and outlived him by thirty-four years; the copper-roofed hall it screens was completed only in 1614. Vicenza's council still calls the building the Basilica, a name Palladio borrowed from Vitruvius for any large civic hall, not a church.