In addition to the Villa Emo, I chose to visit the two villas where I had introductions to the owners (Villa Cornaro and La Malcontenta) plus the incomparable Rotonda.

Some people come by their Palladian villas the same way they acquire their aquiline noses or their exuberant Titian locks: It's all part of that crapshoot called inheritance. Others pick up a copy of the real estate section of The New York Times. Carl and Sally Gable had been thinking of retiring to New Hampshire, but then they saw the ad. And then they saw the pictures, and they started reading all the books I'd been reading, and they came to see the villa, and . . . they fell in love. Who wouldn't. The Villa Cornaro is remarkable for two things: its magnificent two-story projecting portico and its location right on the main drag of Piombino Dese, which can truthfully be described as one of the more unattractive villages in Italy. It straggles around, without any coherent plan or center, with a few dusty cafés and a charmless church. All the other important Palladian villas either are surrounded by rolling green fields, or are perched on hilltops, or sit by the side of a river (complete with weeping willows), but the Cornaro is so confident of its own magnificence that it just stands there, a devastatingly handsome giant surrounded by mongrels and pygmies. With no room for the elongated barchesse of the villas Emo and Barbaro, Palladio took the "skyscraper" route and built upward, designing the famous huge double portico that dominates the facade of the house to this day.

And the odd thing is that the moment I walked into the villa to meet its owners, the Gables, I suddenly felt myself almost involuntarily standing up straight, holding my shoulders back, in a vain attempt to measure up to the sublime beauty of my surroundings. "It is strange living here," Sally Gable agreed. "We have been entrusted with something so extraordinary that you can never take it for granted. You have to treat a building like this with great respect, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun, too."

We wandered into the sala, or hall—always the largest room in any Palladian villa—where we were surrounded by larger-than-life-size statues of generations of Cornaros, ranging from the beautiful Queen Caterina, who had delivered the island of Cyprus to the Venetian Republic through her marriage to James II, king of Cyprus. But then we moved on to the dining room, where clouds of stucco putti cavorted across the walls and ceiling, and Sally told me the story of how in the 1950s, when the villa had been a church nursery school, the nuns had "cleaned up" the statues, emasculating the poor boys. But the Gables haven't lost hope: Only the other day they found Queen Caterina's long-lost finger, hidden away behind her skirt, so they are convinced that there must be a cache of miniature penises somewhere, waiting to be re-attached—if they could just find them.