Villa Porto was designed in 1554 and traditionally attributed to the Italian architect Andrea Palladio, but not included by UNESCO in the strict list of Palladian Villas of Veneto
In 1554, Paolo Porto and his brothers divided up their father’s inheritance, Paolo acquiring an estate at Vivaro, north of Vicenza. Here, during the subsequent four years, he realised a villa which tradition holds was designed by Palladio. The Conte Paolo Porto, one of the most powerful canons of the Cathedral (in 1550 he was on the point of becoming bishop) was a sophisticated and cultured man, who passed much time in Rome where he could count on the friendship of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Porto also numbered among his Vicentine friends and relatives Palladio’s foremost patrons, men like Giangiorgio Trissino, Biagio Saraceno, Bernardo Schio, and Girolamo Garzadori.
It is perhaps this network of friendships which most easily placed him in contact with Palladio, although in this regard careful inspection of the villa’s architecture raises more doubts than certainties. For one discerns various successive constructional phases, which render the identification of an original Palladian scheme, if any, most difficult. The pronaos, for example, is grafted onto the main block with manifest discontinuity. Moreover, the two lateral wings are without doubt nineteenth-century, and actually the product of a belated “Palladianization” of the villa at the hands of the architect Antonio Caregaro Negrin.
References:Rosenborg Palace was built in the period 1606-34 as Christian IV’s summerhouse just outside the ramparts of Copenhagen. Christian IV was very fond of the palace and often stayed at the castle when he resided in Copenhagen, and it was here that he died in 1648. After his death, the palace passed to his son King Frederik III, who together with his queen, Sophie Amalie, carried out several types of modernisation.
The last king who used the place as a residence was Frederik IV, and around 1720, Rosenborg was abandoned in favor of Frederiksborg Palace.Through the 1700s, considerable art treasures were collected at Rosenborg Castle, among other things items from the estates of deceased royalty and from Christiansborg after the fire there in 1794.
Soon the idea of a museum arose, and that was realised in 1833, which is The Royal Danish Collection’s official year of establishment.