The Villa Loredan Valier Perocco di Meduna, also known as Villa Loredan at Carbonera or Villa Loredan Valier Perocco, is a late 17th- and early 18th-century aristocratic villa located in Vascon, a district of Carbonera in the northern Italian region of Veneto. Set discreetly within a still-intact walled enclosure of Trevisan countryside, the villa is distinguished by its symmetrical three-body composition, with a cubic manor house flanked by two lower porticoed barchesse, and by the spectacular double-height frescoed hall on its piano nobile, recognized today as one of the most striking examples of Baroque illusionistic decoration in the Veneto.
Setting and territory The villa stands isolated in a small, intact quadrant of luxuriant Trevisan countryside, set several hundred metres east of the ancient road that runs from Treviso–Sant'Artemio through Lancenigo to Maserada, where it meets the Roman Via Postumia near the historic fords of the Piave river. The site also lies close to the north–south Via Claudia Augusta Altinate, which connected Altino to the prealpine passes of the Bellunese, and to the Ungaresca variant running from Treviso through Lancenigo and Vascon toward Lovadina.
The Carta Archeologica del Veneto records that a road bed of the Roman centuriation of Tarvisium crosses the great walled quadrangle of the villa's brolo just north of the manor house, perpendicular to its south-west/north-east axis, an orientation the villa itself preserves. A Roman "sawn-amphora tomb" and traces of the Via Claudia Augusta have been reported in the immediate vicinity. The site's terrain alternates gravelly Piave alluvial fans with clay strata; the contact between these layers feeds several risorgive springs, one of which, a source of the Mignagola stream, rises inside the walled brolo itself.
History
Before the villa: the Trevisan family (15th–17th centuries) Substantial landholdings at Vascon were held from at least the mid-15th century by the Venetian patrician Trevisan family of the "Santa Maria Formosa" branch, part of the wider pattern of Venetian terraferma investment that followed the consolidation of Venetian rule over the Marca Trevigiana in 1389 and the Padovano in 1405. By the 16th century a unitary Vascon estate was held by Francesco Trevisan q. Zuanne (b. c. 1510), who in 1535 married Elisabetta Zen and had three sons: Zuanne (1538–1606), Marco (1541–1616) and Ludovico (Alvise, 1548–1592). Two parallel inheritance lines descended from the elder two sons. Through the senior line, Zuanne's grandson Daniele Trevisan (b. 1582), who married Elisabetta Giustinian in 1624, had a single daughter and heiress, Marietta. In 1644 Marietta married Zuanne Loredan (1610–1699) q. Domenico, of the branch later known as "di San Vio", bringing the Vascon estate as part of her dowry. This is the documented "Trevisan root" of the Vascon property that became the Loredan villa. Through the cadet line, Marco Trevisan's granddaughter Bianca (d. 1677), heiress of Francesco Trevisan q. Marco (1578–1647) and Elisabetta Valier, married Scipione Boldù in 1647, transferring the second portion of the Vascon estate to the Boldù family. Both passages occurred almost simultaneously, in the mid-1640s, and are first recorded as new patrician names in the parish at Bishop Gian Antonio Lupi's pastoral visit of 6 June 1648. Because the originally unitary Trevisan estate had accumulated layers of dotal, usufructuary and livello rights, a Venetian magistrature act (Procurator-Giudici, 20 June 1679) was required to ratify the effective rights of all interested parties. Only after this date, when he was 69, was Zuanne Loredan free to dispose of his Vascon property without encumbrance, and free to undertake substantial building work on the manor house.
The 17th-century villa: first nucleus under Zuanne Loredan The Loredan are first implicitly attested at Vascon in 1648, when Bishop Lupi listed them, along with the Boldù, among the delinquent contributors to the parish luminaria, indicating that the young couple Zuanne and Marietta Loredan had already begun seasonal residence in Vascon, then presumably using the older Trevisan manor. A worn Venetian-Gothic well-head of late 14th-century type, surviving behind the manor with an abraded coat of arms, hints at the antiquity and nobility of the prior settlement. Several architectural and proportional clues suggest that the present manor was built, more accurately re-built, by Zuanne Loredan in the years immediately after the 1679 settlement, on the foundations and partly on the masonry of an earlier 16th-century Trevisan house. The decision to preserve the orientation of the older structure is significant: the manor's axis, with façade facing south-west, follows the same alignment as the great walled rectangle of the brolo, which itself conforms to the Roman centuriation grid. The resulting building is a tall parallelepiped containing a raised ground floor, a piano nobile and a lowered attic storey, under a four-pitched hipped roof. Its plan follows the canonical Veneto tripartite scheme: a central portego running through from front to back façade, two pairs of rooms on each side, and a two-flight staircase placed transversely between the western rooms. A schematic map of 1713 records this late 17th-century configuration, showing the great walled rectangle of the brolo with the cubic manor inside, a small service body attached to the rear (likely the predecessor of today's left barchessa), and the still-extant "gardener's house" sketched to the south-east.
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