In the historic fabric of the city, just a few steps from Corso Porta Borsari, hides a palace that holds an important if little-known distinction: Palazzo Della Torre is the only work that Andrea Palladio â one of the most influential architects in Western history â ever built in Verona. A discreet presence, marked by difficult events, but still capable today of telling much to those who pause to observe it carefully.
The commissioner of the work was Giambattista Della Torre, a wealthy Veronese with an extraordinary network of relationships. He was related to leading Vicenza families such as the Valmarana and the Thiene â the latter already patrons of Palladio â and was on friendly terms with intellectuals and artists of the time: the geographer Giovan Battista Ramusio, the physician Giovanni Fracastoro, the humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino and the architect Michele Sanmicheli. A man of his time, cultured and ambitious, who chose the very best the Renaissance could offer.
Andrea Palladio and the monumental courtyard
The task entrusted to Palladio was anything but simple: to bring together around a monumental courtyard a series of pre-existing buildings, of different periods and styles, restoring to the whole a unified and elegant appearance. The construction site was in the so-called contrada San Marco, in the heart of the ancient city, near the Roman Porta Borsari. A challenge of urban stitching, not a build from scratch.
Work most likely began around 1555, but proceeded for a long time and with uncertain continuity. By the death of Giambattista Della Torre in 1568, the building site was still open. Palladio himself, in his famous treatise I quattro libri dell'architettura of 1570, recalled the work as largely complete, while acknowledging its unfinished state. It thus remains, like Palazzo Bevilacqua not far away, one of those Renaissance projects that history did not allow to be finished.
Of what was actually built, precise knowledge is made difficult by the scarcity of original documents. The surveys and descriptions drawn up from the eighteenth century onwards â including those by Francesco Muttoni and Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi â present often contradictory data, and even the plates of the Quattro libri turn out, in this case, to be a not always reliable source. Some photographs taken around 1908, however, offer a precious glimpse of the state of the palace before the twentieth-century devastations: from those images it emerges clearly that only a part of the original project had actually been completed.
The hardest blow came in 1945, when an Allied bombing caused very serious damage to the structure. The most compromised section was demolished after the war and rebuilt with a completely different intended use: it became a cinema, which remained active until the 1980s. A transformation that has changed forever the features of this corner of the city.
Despite everything, significant evidence of Palladio's intervention survives: a majestic entrance portal and, above all, the courtyard with columns and entablature, which still today allows one to imagine the grandeur of the original project. They are elements enough to understand why Palladio had chosen this very space as the compositional centre of the entire architectural operation: the courtyard was not a mere passage, but the throbbing heart of the palace, the place around which everything was supposed to revolve.
Palazzo Della Torre is therefore a monument that requires a little imagination, but that rewards those willing to exercise it. In that sequence of columns and in that surviving portal, one can still read clearly the signature of one of the greatest architects Italy has ever produced.