The most prized Renaissance "piece" in the city, which imitates ancient Roman artifacts and is now an isolated relic of a noble estate (originally Cornaro, recently Benvenuti). It maintains an important urban reference role and is known by all, despite its modest size and its now somewhat out-of-the-way position relative to the center.
There is no doubt about the theatrical role of the arch, placed at the only point of the villa's fence visible from the main road. From the entrance, the climb to the villa's floor is a steep staircase, important for the scenery and for continuity with the urban axis, but functionally the elevation has always been more easily navigated along the road and from the entrance uphill.
The Villa Gate was born and today remains the testament to the axis of Via Garibaldi, unique with Via Matteotti that crosses the historic center of Este from north to south, passing in front of the Cathedral and exiting through the gate and Ponte San Francesco. A true landmark, albeit not very obvious.
Designed larger than the city’s palaces, the Arch, built in 1525 for Alvise Cornaro, Doge of Venice, dominates the sixteenth-century image of a medieval village that the nobles of the lagoon discover while ascending the Bisatto by boat. This marks the beginning of the vacation season that over the next three centuries will bring dozens of Villas and Urban Palaces to Este.
Giovanni Maria Falconetto (1458-1534) designs the portal for Alvise Cornaro, Doge of Venice and owner of the large estate overlooking the city. An entrance portal conceived as an ancient monumental relic and above all suitable to serve as the scenic backdrop for a performance. In the Cornaro villa in Padua, Falconetto had already designed a portico specifically as a theatrical front and backdrop to host the comedies of Ruzante, a great friend of Cornaro.
The arch presents itself as a theatrical scene, and perhaps it was, on some evenings of the vacation season in the late 1500s. In fact, Falconetto, an extraordinary painter of quadratures, realizes few architectures, often for his friend Alvise Cornaro. These are "scenic" buildings, made to play and perform in the garden (in the image the loggia built for the Cornaro villa in Padua), where Ruzante, a friend of Cornaro, presented his comedies.
Falconetto is a master of scenography, and the ancient portal recurs throughout his production, like a frame that outlines fragments of gardens and mythological stories, to which the splendid frescoes of the Zodiac refer. With these references, the arch opened onto the green backdrop should be seen as the frame of a pictorially designed image.
The place is a landscape of the heart (highlighted by Fai), photographed by every visitor attentive to romantic framing, chosen in every season also for the absence of severe recent visual impacts.
The arch seductively reproduces ancient forms, and the effect of the time-patinated stone from Nanto enhances the "deception," to the point of losing the original sense of the portal by inserting it into a romantic context of Foscolian "ruinism," accentuated by the dark green of the oaks and cypress trees inside and by the absence of statues in the niches, which were already lost in the 1800s.
