Roncade

The «castle of Roncade» is not a castle: it is an early sixteenth-century Venetian villa, shut inside a ring of battlemented walls with stout towers at the corners and a moat all around, as though it were a medieval stronghold. It was built by Agnesina Badoer and her husband Girolamo Giustinian: the works were already under way in 1514, by 1522 the house could receive important visitors, and on a map of 1536 the building already appears as one sees it today, walls and towers included. In 1915 the villa was bought by the Ciani Bassetti family, to whom it still belongs.

Agnesina, who had inherited her father's entire estate under a will of 1495, did not limit herself to building. Her father had planned for the family chapel a marble altar with its own iconography; on his death she changed it, replacing the figure of Saint Benedict with that of Saint James and adding Saint Jerome, and placing in positions of honour Saint Michael the Archangel and Saint Agnes, her mother's patron and her own. In the villa's oratory, dedicated to Saint Anne, are the busts of herself and her husband. The rest of Roncade's territory had been made by the Roman roads — the via Claudia Augusta Altinate, built in 15 BC by the general Drusus, and the via Annia — and then by the Collalto family, its masters from the tenth century.