The villa's massive portico, with its fourteen-foot doorway, faces the Brenta Canal, so that visitors would arrive by boat and be greeted by their hosts standing there, towering above them, as they walked up the two stone staircases at each side. I suppose if I'd had any sense of drama, I too would have chartered a boat, but instead I parked my car outside the gates and strolled with Barbara Foscari along a shady allée toward the entrance. "Yes, it is magnificent, but we have tried to make it intimate," she explained as we walked into the huge cruciform-shaped sala. Every Palladian villa has a central sala which would have been used for entertaining, theatrical performances, weddings, and big parties, but on either side of the sala are sets of rooms that are more intimate in scale. "I think with a house like this, with its frescoes and architectural integrity," Barbara continued, "the furniture needs to be very quiet." So quiet that in one salon I wondered where the sofa began and the fresco ended: The cream-and-red silk stripes seemed to have migrated from one to the other, but this was of course entirely intentional, since the sofa fabric had been woven in Asolo to match the fabric in the wall painting. As we walked through the house together, I kept imagining what it could possibly be like to live surrounded by such beauty. Would you ever just take it for granted and maybe stop noticing it altogether? "Oh no," Barbara said, smiling, "one never gets used to beauty—one keeps being surprised and inspired by it."

After a week of total Palladio immersion, I knew what she meant. Surprised and inspired. But also soothed and reassured by the fact that one man could have created a whole world of such profoundly pleasing, rational beauty, reflecting the Renaissance idea of a universe subject to human reason. Disorder and ugliness were banished from his Garden of Eden, and replaced by the pure aesthetic and intellectual delight of La Rotonda's dome, the Villa Cornaro's double portico, the Villa Emo's elegant barchesse, and La Malcontenta's vaulted sala.