[2] It is also known as La Malcontenta ("The Discontented"), a nickname which—according to a legend—it received when the spouse of one of the Foscaris was locked up in the house because she allegedly did not live up to her conjugal duty.

[3] The villa was commissioned by the brothers Nicolò and Alvise (Luigi) Foscari, members of a very famous patrician Venetian family.

It also features many Roman elements such as a portico, large columns, a triangular pediment, and an emphasis on verticality.

[1] Since they were painted, the frescoes have also dulled over time, signs of the increasing threat that air pollution poses to works of art.The British travel writer Robert Byron visited the villa in 1933 and afterwards wrote that bon vivant Albert Clinton Landsberg had, nine years earlier, found the villa "at the point of ruin, doorless and windowless, a granary of indeterminate farm-produce.

"[7] The villa had indeed been vacated in the early 19th century, the surrounding stables and other buildings had fallen apart and were demolished by Austrian troops during the 1848 uprisings.

At the end of the 19th century however, banker Baron Frédéric Emile d'Erlanger, based in Paris and London, had found the house in the above described condition, then leased the villa from the Foscari family, and undertook some renovation work.

Bertie Landsberg had purchased the villa in 1926, together with his friends Paul Rodocanachi and Catherine, Baroness d'Erlanger, the daughter-in-law of the former tenant.

[8] The new owners renovated the house and gardens and invited members of the high-society to lavish salons during summer seasons: impresario Sergei Diaghilev, dancers Boris Kochno and Serge Lifar, writer Paul Morand, architect Le Corbusier, Winston Churchill, among others.

[9] Bertie Landsberg, issue of an originally Jewish banking family, as the Erlangers, fled the Italian Fascists in 1939 and only returned to the villa in 1947.

He and his wife, Barbara del Vicario, undertook a painstaking process of restoring it to its original grandeur.

[10] Since 1996 the building has been conserved as part of the World Heritage Site "City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto".