City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto

Few architects have shaped a whole city the way Andrea Palladio shaped Vicenza. His palazzi line the streets of this Veneto town, while his country villas dot the surrounding region — buildings whose disciplined classicism spawned the Palladian style later carried to England and North America. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1994, the World Heritage listing gathers both the urban ensemble and the scattered villas, the legacy that made a city once under Venetian rule one of architecture's great reference points.