During Christmas Holidays I visited some Venetian Villas and I fell in a romanthic mood. The background is the entrance to the Stables of Villa Pisani in Stra (20 mile from Venice). The superb villa of the noble Pisani family lies along the Riviera del Brenta, an ideal extension of Venetian Gran Canal on the land. In its 114 rooms doges, kings and emperors were welcomed and nowadays it is a national museum which conserves eighteenth and nineteenth century works of art and furniture, as Gianbattista Tiepolo's masterpiece, The Glory of the Pisani family, a fresco on the ceiling of the ballroom. "Every step is a new sight and a new beauty": thus described Villa Pisani garden an enthusiastic traveller in the nineteenth century. As in the past, the garden is enchanting with its flamboyant sights, original architecture, its famous maze, its valuable citrus fruit collection and its greenhouses with plants and flowers, "everything which gives pleasure to the sight and gratifies our taste", as boasted Almorò Pisani. The Pisani di Santo Stefano family, which commissioned the construction of the villa, was an important branch of the ancient patrician Pisani family of Venice. They got enormously rich during the fourteenth century with trade and land rent in the 15th century they acquired a large fief in the Paduan plain. The eighteenth century was the golden century of the family which held the higher position of the Republic of Venice. Andrea Pisani Alvise (1664-1741) was appointed ambassador to the court of the Sun King who even stood godfather to Pisani's son. He then became doge (1735), the highest position of the family. But the decline was soon to come, the collapse of the Republic (1797) together with the vice of game led Pisani family to fall into crippling debts. This situation forced them to sell the villa to Napoleon on January 11th 1807 for 1,901,000 Venetian liras. Napoleon Bonaparte had become King of Italy in 1805 and he had appointed viceroy his stepson Eugène Beauharnais, who got the villa. Eugène was an educated patron and he commissioned several rehabilitation works which changed the look of many rooms and of the garden. In 1814 the battle of Waterloo decided the history of Europe and brought the Habsburg imperial family, lords of Veneto, to Villa Pisani. The villa thus became the favourite vacation palace of Marianna Carolina, empress of Austria and hosted the whole European aristocracy, from the king of Spain Charles IV (1815) to the czar of Russia Alexander I (1822), from the king of Naples Ferdinand II (1837) to the king of Greece Otto (1837) and many others. The brilliant life at court stopped in 1866, when Veneto was annexed by the Kingdom of Italy. The villa did not become part of the Savoy family possessions but became property of the State, thus losing its role of entertainment. Though uninhabited, it had several notable visitors such as Wagner, D'Annunzio (the basic passage of his novel "The Flame of Life" is set at Villa Pisani), Mussolini and Hitler (their first official meeting took place here in 1934). Last but not least the villa was visited by myself ;-D!!!!! DAZ M3; DAZ Victoria 4.2; FaceOff: Skin Realism Kit for V4; Visual Silence: Refined Taste for M3; Nogart: Naval Uniform Set; DAZ: Mil Dog; RDNA Render Studio for Poser; Background "The Stables" and the garden at Villa Pisani (photo by myself). Thank you for viewing and drop a note if you like!