For all its splendor, the Villa Cornaro was, of course, a real house where real people lived their complicated, happy, messy lives. But the thing to keep in mind with houses like these is that there were two parallel sets of lives going on simultaneously: the family downstairs, and an army of servants and laborers squeezed into the attic—along with the grain (and the uninvited rats) that was stored there after the harvest. Sally and I climbed slowly up a small circular stone staircase (Palladio's interior staircases are always hidden away in order not to disturb the strict symmetry of his design) and arrived in a huge series of rooms right up under the eaves, where servants, grain, and rats would have existed in cozy proximity. And there, etched upon the walls, were strange drawings of young men in fancy plumed hats and buckled shoes, some cartoonish ducks that could have been Donald's Italian ancestors, and rough scribbles of (much) larger versions of the putti's missing bits. Graffiti that was half a millennium old and yet still as fresh and crude as the day some bored servant had decided to amuse himself by decorating a corner of his "room."

If the site at Piombino Dese had been a challenge, and most of his other villas were part of working farms, Palladio was freed of all such mundane constraints at La Rotonda. Here he was presented with the ideal site as well as a patron, Paolo Almerico, a man of the Church. The natural beauty of the hilltop site, with its views on all four sides, allowed Palladio to finally execute a design that he'd been playing around with all his life: a circle enclosed in a cube with four identical porticoes, each facing a different but equally stunning vista. As with most brilliant ideas, it was simplicity itself.

There's something strange but also liberating about a house with no front or back or sides. Sure, there is an approach from the road, but who's to say that the portico at the top of the drive is the entrance? So instead of going straight in, I walked slowly around the entire house, soothed and seduced by its supreme confidence and equanimity. When I did finally enter, I found myself in a circular room that stretched all the way up to the dome, where, at the center, I saw an oculus, or "eye," through which streamed the sunshine that illuminated the entire space.

As I wandered through the perfectly proportioned rooms, their open doors precisely aligned so that the eye is drawn along the entire enfilade, I was enchanted, but at the same time I felt that something was missing. And what was missing, of course, was all the warmth and mess and charm of a house that is lived in. Without human contact, houses lose their raison d'être and become magnificent stage sets desperately in need of the strutting, shouting, sweating actors who bring them to life.

When Alvise and Nicolò Foscari asked Palladio to design a villa for them in the late 1550s, they made it clear that they wanted a country palazzo, not some ritzed-up farm. The two brothers, who came from one of Venice's most powerful families, were out to convey a sense of terribilita, shock and awe, and had the financial heft to allow Palladio to produce his first truly grand work. The villa, known as La Malcontenta, stayed in the Foscari family until the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1799. Two centuries went by, and then through a bizarre turn of the historical roundabout, Antonio Foscari reacquired his ancestral home in 1973. As a young boy growing up outside Venice during the Second World War, he remembers waiting for the air raids to end so that he and his father could bicycle furiously out along the banks of the Brenta Canal to see if "their" house had survived. As indeed it did, miraculously undamaged, despite the best efforts of the American and German bombers. And now sixty years later, La Malcontenta has been brought back to life.