Villa Godi

Villa Godi is a patrician villa in Lugo di Vicenza, Veneto, northern Italy. It was one of the first projects by Andrea Palladio, as attested in his monograph I quattro libri dell'architettura. The work was commissioned by the brothers Girolamo, Pietro and Marcantonio Godi, started in 1537 and concluded in 1542, with later modifications to the rear entry and gardens.

The villa has been designated by UNESCO as part of the World Heritage Site "City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto". The villa and extensive gardens are open to the public in the afternoon, year round. The building also houses a museum of archeology in the basement, with hundreds of fossils of plant and animal life in the region. Its large park was laid out in the 19th century and was used as a film location for Senso.

Architectural details

The building is striking for the lack of ornamentation usually associated with Palladio's mature work, and for the refined, symmetrical proportions of the façade and massing of the structure. The plan is arranged with suites of apartments arranged symmetrically on each side of the main sala and a recessed entry loggia. The plan published in I quattro libri dell'architettura 28 years after the building's completion is probably a revision of Palladio's original design and includes an extensive complex of farm buildings which are not part of the actual realisation.

Villa

A villa was originally an ancient Roman upper-class country house. Since its origins in the Roman villa, the idea and function of a villa have evolved considerably. After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became small farming compounds, which were increasingly fortified in Late Antiquity, sometimes transferred to the Church for reuse as a monastery. Then they gradually re-evolved through the Middle Ages, into elegant upper-class country homes. In modern parlance 'villa' can refer to various types and sizes of residences, ranging from the suburban "semi-detached" double villa to residences in the wildland–urban interface.

Roman

In ancient Roman architecture a villa was originally a country house built for the élite. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, identified several kinds of villas:

Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio (Italian pronunciation: [anˈdrɛːa palˈlaːdjo]; 30 November 1508 -19 August 1580) was an Italian architect active in the Republic of Venice. Palladio, influenced by Roman and Greek architecture, primarily by Vitruvius, is widely considered to be the most influential individual in the history of architecture. All of his buildings are located in what was the Venetian Republic, but his teachings, summarized in the architectural treatise, The Four Books of Architecture, gained him wide recognition. The city of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Biography

Palladio was born on 30 November 1508 in Padua and was given the name, Andrea Di Pietro della Gondola. His father, Pietro, called "Della Gondola", was a miller. From early on, Andrea Palladio was introduced into the work of building. In Padua he gained his first experiences as a stonecutter in the sculpture workshop of Bartolomeo Cavazza da Sossano, who is said to have imposed particularly hard working conditions. At the age of sixteen he moved to Vicenza where he would reside for most of his life. Here he became an assistant in the Pedemuro studio, a leading workshop of stonecutters and masons. He joined a guild of stonemasons and bricklayers. He was employed as a stonemason to make monuments and decorative sculptures. These sculptures reflected the Mannerist style of the architect Michele Sanmicheli.

GODI

GODI is a package management system for the OCaml programming language. It provides dependency management for OCaml similar to the way CPAN provides package management for Perl. GODI is derived from the NetBSD pkgsrc system.

The acronym GODI simultaneously stands for both "Gerd Ocaml DIstribution" and "General Ocaml DIstribution", Gerd being the first name of the project's initiator, Gerd Stolpmann.

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