Given all the noise surrounding the 500th anniversary celebrations of Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, better known as Palladio, this is a time for effortless one-upmanship.

It’s not enough just to go to exhibitions and visit real Palladio buildings, friends: to complete the picture you have to stay in one of his villas as I did recently… OK, so it’s not so very exclusive. Anyone can rent the Villa Saraceno from the Landmark Trust, which rescued the place from near-dereliction in the mid 1990s. Nor is the threat over. We found another early farmhouse by Palladio in a nearby village, fenced off, repairs seemingly abandoned. A far cry from the immaculate preservation of the much grander Villa Rotonda, just outside Vicenza where we also marvelled at Palladio and Scamozzi’s extraordinary Teatro Olympico, a covered ampitheatre with extraordinary backstage tricks of perspective.

A sybaritic time of it we had at the Villa Saraceno, where a group of us had got together for a long weekend to celebrate the birthday of an old friend (in the picture we’re re-enacting a famous painting, as you do). As the fog rolled in from the Italian fens, we lit the fires, downed the Prosecco and the delicious peasant food, and reflected that this was, after all, just an extension to a working farmhouse. The enormous granaries in the roof spaces bore witness to that. 

Amazingly, there are still plans to drive a new motorway through the over-populated landscape of Palladio villas – a motorway that, if built, would pass very close to the Villa Saraceno. It’s already been delayed some years, and the recession may delay it further. Let’s hope so.