Andrea Palladio
Villa Capra "La Rotonda"
In 1565 a priest, Paolo Almerico, on his retirement from the Vatican, decided to return to his home town of Vicenza in the Venetian countryside and build a country house. This house, later known as 'La Rotonda', was to be one of Palladio's best-known legacies to the architectural world. Villa Capra may have inspired a thousand subsequent buildings, but the villa was itself inspired by the Pantheon in Rome.