Villa Mandella, Renaissance villa in Isola Rizza, Italy

Villa Mandella is a Venetian villa in Isola Rizza whose square three-storey manor house is flanked symmetrically by two large rectangular barchesse with porticoes, set back from the main building. The estate lies in open farmland with a south-west front on a regular square plot, enclosed by a boundary wall whose entrance rises into two rusticated pillars topped by statues and flanked by small shrines.

Knight Andrea Mandelli founded the villa in 1589 by commissioning architects to design a grand country estate with a main manor house. The layout reflects the building strategy of wealthy Venetian families who constructed compounds with economic buildings on their lands.

The villa displays typical Venetian architectural features with symmetrical spaces and formal gardens that reflect Renaissance country living. Visitors can see in the grounds how the planting arrangements and carefully designed areas show how wealthy families organized their estates.

Access to the villa comes through an avenue that extends from the main drive and crosses the park before reaching the buildings. Visitors should wear sturdy shoes as the pathways through the grounds can sometimes be uneven.

The limonaia on the estate's eastern side is a single rectangular hall decorated outside with columns, built to shelter citrus and exotic plants through winter. It is one of the few winter gardens surviving in the Veneto. The gardens themselves were laid out in the early 1600s by Andrea Mandelli on Renaissance lines, with perpendicular paths, box-edged beds and a central avenue of cypresses and cedars of Lebanon.