Palladio's Vicenza

Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) did most of his work around the town of Vicenza in northern Italy, which seems to have been quite a place. From Roderick Morris' review, in the TLS, of The Private Palladio by Guido Beltramini:

Vicenza was one of the wealthiest cities in Europe thanks to the silk trade. Its leading citizens raised silk worms on their neighbouring country estates and manufactured the textiles for export in the numerous silk mills on the city's waterways. . . . Although prosperous and with a highly educated elite, the city was deeply riven by factional rivalries and murderous domestic disputes which, as related by Beltramini, read like the plots of Jacobean revenge tragedies. In one notorious incident, a widow, Bisabetta da Roma, fell in love with a member of the Valmarana family, Alberto, but he rejected her. When her attempt to poison him failed, she incited her brother to defend her honour. Lisabetta's brother and a gang of hired thugs burst into the Palazzo Valmarana, murdered Alberto, two of his brothers and two servants. The forensic examination of the corpses found that Alberto had received thirty-eight knife and bullet wounds. . . .

When Palladio's patron Giangiorgio Trissino remarried after the death of his first wife, his son Giulio with ten armed men drove his stepmother from the house where she was staying and ransacked it. On a later occasion Giulio dragged his ailing, nearly seventy-year-old  father out of bed and hurled him into the street. Denounced by his half brother Ciro as a Lutheran heretic, Giulio died in prison in 1577. By then Ciro had been murdered by assassins, with fourteen stab wounds to the face. Seven years on, Ciro's son Marcantonio killed the man behind the attack in a similar manner. The vendetta continued when Marcantonio's wife and infant son were shot with a harquebus and knifed to death. 

Palladio's Villa Piovene became a crime scene when in 1577 the owner of the Villa Godi next door forced his way in and murdered his neighbour, who had tried to take refuge in a wardrobe. 

Some years earlier Paolo Almerico, who was to commission Palladio's most celebrated building, the Villa Rotonda, spent several years in prison for mudering Bartolomeo Pagliarino, who had just commissioned Palladio to build a villa at Lanze. "One day they will cut each other to pieces," a Venetian magistrate remarked on Vicenza's perennial mayhem.

Palladio's own son Leonida was eventually accused of murdering the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair, but he was acquitted on grounds of self defense. Ah, the oh-so-civilized Renaissance.