Palazzo Te, Mantua

Palazzo Te stands on the southern edge of Mantua, the Lombard city of the Gonzaga, built between 1525 and 1535 as a suburban pleasure villa for Federico II Gonzaga and designed by Giulio Romano, Raphael's most gifted pupil. It is regarded as the supreme masterpiece of Mannerist architecture, a single-storey palace arranged around a square courtyard, where Giulio deliberately bent the rules of classical design — slipping triglyphs, rusticated surfaces and unsettling proportions — to delight and disconcert. Inside, the villa is a sequence of extravagantly frescoed rooms. The Sala di Amore e Psiche celebrates Federico's loves with sensuous banquet scenes, while the celebrated Sala dei Giganti envelops the visitor entirely: a single continuous fresco in which the giants, struck down by Jupiter, appear to bring the painted architecture crashing down around the room in one of the most overwhelming illusions in Western art. Other rooms display the Gonzaga emblems, horses and stucco work, and the gardens and loggias extend the sense of leisure. A visit takes one and a half to two hours and pairs naturally with the Palazzo Ducale in the city centre, a 20-minute walk or short ride away. The villa is reached on foot or by bus from central Mantua and is rarely as crowded as Italy's headline sights; weekday mornings are quietest, with weekends and summer busier. Photography without flash is generally permitted, and the Sala dei Giganti and the courtyard facades are the standout subjects. For lovers of Renaissance and Mannerist art, Palazzo Te is one of northern Italy's most thrilling interiors and a defining work of 16th-century design.