Quinto Vicentino is a quiet farming town on the flat plain just north-east of Vicenza, and its town hall happens to be a villa by Andrea Palladio. Villa Thiene was commissioned in the sixteenth century by the brothers Marcantonio and Adriano Thiene, members of one of the most powerful families in Vicenza, and Palladio drew up a grand design for it with courtyards and wings that would have spread across the fields. Only part of that plan was ever built. What stands today is a solid, rather austere block, and the council offices are inside it, which gives the place a pleasingly everyday feeling.
That unfinished quality is part of the interest. Palladio's villas were not just country retreats for the wealthy; they were working farms, centres of estates that the Venetian nobility developed as the Republic of Venice turned from the sea toward the land in the sixteenth century. The barns, granaries and dovecotes were meant to sit alongside the owner's rooms in one harmonious composition. At Quinto you can see how such a scheme was supposed to begin, and imagine the rest.
The surrounding countryside is pancake-flat, a patchwork of maize fields, irrigation ditches, poplar rows and small rivers like the Tesina, which slides past the town. This is not curve country, and nobody pretends it is. What it offers instead is easy riding on small roads between villages with campaniles that you can see from miles away, and the chance to tick off several Palladian villas in a single morning. Villa Emo at Fanzolo, Villa Badoer at Fratta Polesine and the cluster around Vicenza itself all fit into a day's riding across the Veneto plain.
The best time is spring, when the fields are green and the air is still fresh, or autumn, when the maize has come in and the mist sits low in the morning. Summer days can be heavy and humid. The town is small, under two thousand people, but Monticello Conte Otto, five kilometres away, and Vicenza itself have plenty of fuel stations, and you are never far from a bar for a coffee and a tramezzino.
If you want the full Palladio story with grand interiors and frescoes, ride on to one of the villas that are open as house museums. If you want to see how his ideas became part of the furniture of daily life, stop here, park outside the town hall and look at it for a while.