Villa Godi Malinverni is one of the enchanting villas in the Veneto region, located in the hills of Lonedo di Lugo, in the upper Vicenza area. Imposing and fairytale, this extraordinary structure was included in the UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996 together with the other Palladian villas. It seems to have been one of the first works of Andrea Palladio, at least from what the Venetian architect reports in his treatise "The Four Books of Architecture" of 1570. The works began by the will of Enrico Antonio Godi, who began with the construction of a Doric barchessa in the left courtyard, and then left the works, in 1537, totally in the hands of Palladio.

The villa is clearly symmetrical, organized along a central axis consisting of a loggia and a large hall, in which two apartments of four rooms each overlook. From 1540 onwards the interiors were decorated thanks to the hands of Gualtiero Padovano who frescoed the loggia and the right wing of the building. These frescoes, still well preserved, are detailed enough to make us understand how different the landscapes and the surrounding environment were.

The park of the villa is Romanesque, characterized by a high variety of trees and a beautiful swan pond in its center. Its centuries-old plants and long avenues date back to the last century, when Count Andrea Piovene commissioned the architect Antonio Caregaro Negrin to rearrange and arrange the garden. At the rear of the villa we find instead Italian gardens of the seventeenth century, embellished with columns and statues of Marinali and Albanian, with numerous pools and fountains.

Villa Godi Malinverni is located a few meters from Villa Piovene, a construction always attributed to Andrea Palladio. These two pearls are the demonstration of a still immature talent that, although they are different in taste and architectural setting, the refined and elegant aesthetic sense of the young architect are well traceable. Today the villa is easily accessible as the barchessa and the outbuildings are used as a restaurant, thus offering the pleasure of a simple visit or some specialties of the Palladian menu.

As time went on, instead of subsiding, the controversy escalated, and in 1577 Orazio Godi broke into the nearby villa of the Piovene, with evident intent to kill. After turning the apartments upside down, he managed to find Fabio Piovene locked in a closet, and after having let him out, he made him finish with his daggers. The Venetian rector did not tolerate such brutality, and judged that Count Godi should be captured and executed in Signori Square and his confiscated assets. To save himself, the count decided to escape into exile, thus spending the rest of his life in the service of the Duke of Savoy. It was precisely this exasperated desire to rival that prompted the Piovene to commission the same workers who had built Villa Godi.