Un Architetto al tempo di Canova

Palladio Museum, Vicenza At the center of the exhibition there is an intact collection of architectural drawings, protected for centuries in the archive of a noble Paduan family, capable of transporting visitors to a distant world, that of Alessandro Papafava (1784- 1861), a Paduan architect who grew up in difficult times but fervent with passions, after the fall of the Serenissima.

The exceptional collection of 49 sheets and prints by famous architects from Giacomo Quarenghi to Giuseppe Camporese and the Englishman Joseph Michael Gandy, was assembled by Alessandro between 1803 and 1807. In those years he was back in Italy, precisely in Rome, after a period spent in Budapest, Dresden, Vienna and Berlin, and on the advice of Antonio Canova he began studying architecture at the Accademia di San Luca. After two centuries, this precious material was donated by the Papafava dei Carraresi family to the Andrea Palladio International Center for Architecture Studies in Vicenza and returns a rare snapshot of the interests of a young architecture student between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, immersed in architectural culture over the years in which the models of Roman Neoclassicism arrived in the Veneto, revolutionizing its taste.