Villa Padovani – Villa Veneta (www.villapadovani.it – info@villapadovani.it) stands in the enclosed rural courtyard of Piovezzano di Pastrengo, on the morainic hills between Lake Garda, the Valpolicella and Verona. It is a Villa Veneta — one of the historic country estates of the Venetian mainland — listed and protected by the Italian heritage authority.
Its origins go back to the Orci family (15th–16th century). In 1672 it was bought by Giuseppe Carminati, a cheese merchant from Bergamo: the deed lists it con horti, broleto, corte e pozzo — with gardens, orchard, courtyard and well. In 1692 the portal received the coat of arms carved into the keystone: a crowned eagle, its talons resting on a farm cart, with the date.
In 1729 the estate passed by inheritance to the Marinelli family. In July 1796 Masséna, general of the French army, established his headquarters here, as the archive letters attest; tradition holds that Bonaparte tied his reins to the vine in the courtyard.
After the auction of 1878 the estate came in 1931 to the Ronzetti family, who the following year restored the manor house: the cartouche ANNO DOMINI MCMXXXII and the PR monogram in the floor. In 2001 Remo Padovani acquired the property and undertook its complete restoration, recognised in 2018 with the Premio Villa Veneta, restoration category.
Beneath the courtyard runs a hyperthermal water, rising at 53 degrees, whose curative properties for balneotherapy in dermatological, arthro-rheumatic and vascular conditions are recognised by decree of the Italian Ministry of Health of 2005. On that water Le Terme di Remo were founded, a thermal establishment licensed in 2026: access is by prior consultation, under medical direction.
With full regard for the environment and for energy saving, that heat is not wasted: it warms the villa’s hot water and its pools, and reaches the thermal bath at the right temperature for bathing.
The walled orchard and the well of 1672 remain. Villa Padovani offers ten suites, for adults only, and is one of the very few Ville Venete to possess a private thermal spring: one comes here to stay inside history — and also to take the cure.
Type: historic residence with ten suites, for adults from the age of eighteen. CIN IT023057B43QJVI7T7
Accessibility: partial. The lift serves three suites (102, 103 and 104); the duplex suite is not suitable and the others are reached by stairs. Guests who need step-free access are kindly asked to say so when booking, so that one of the three may be reserved.
Parking: private and free within the courtyard, with charging for electric cars. Further spaces outside, adjoining the villa.
In every suite: air conditioning, wi-fi, TV, safe, coffee machine.
Common areas: La Caneva, the indoor water rooms in the old cellar — pool, whirlpool, sauna, steam room, sensory showers, ice fountain and quiet room; outdoor pool; loggia; walled orchard with kitchen garden, pergola and pond; private oratory. Access to La Caneva is included on every day of the stay for guests who book through the villa’s own website.
Le Terme di Remo: licensed thermal establishment, under medical direction. The thermal bath is used by one guest at a time and access is by prior consultation.
Reception: open from 9 to 1 and from 2 to 7. There is no night service.
Arrival and departure: arrival between 2 and 7 in the afternoon, departure by 11. For arrivals outside these hours, please let us know in advance.
Breakfast: from 8 to 10.30, served in the loggia, in the oratory garden according to the season, or in the suite. Cakes made in the house with fruit from the walled orchard.
Dining: there is no restaurant, by choice. The honesty bar is always available. The villa recommends and books restaurants and wineries in Lazise, Bardolino, the Valpolicella and Verona.
Animals: not admitted. The one exception lives in the house: Demi, the family corgi.
Languages at reception: Italian, English and German; one of our staff also speaks Spanish.
Payment: credit cards; the deposit may be paid by bank transfer. The balance is settled on departure.
Tourist tax: 2 euro per person per night, for every night of the stay, not included in the rate and collected on departure on behalf of the Municipality.
Cancellation: on the cancellable rate, free of charge up to four days before arrival.
Services: e-bike hire.
Via Piovezzano Vecchia, 48 37010 Pastrengo (VR)
00390454970891
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Ten suites, and each carries the name of someone who passed through here. Zanzoché, the steward of the motto. Carminati, Marinelli, Orci: the families who handed this courtyard on for three centuries. Doge Manin, the last Doge of Venice, who signed a deed concerning this estate. Masséna and Napoleone, from the French July of 1796. Remo, who brought the place back to life. Gastaldo and Brolo, which are the names of things.
They were drawn one at a time from the buildings around the courtyard, and no two are alike. There is the duplex suite with its wooden and steel stair beneath white beams; the one with the tall mirror that doubles the light, under dark beams; the open-plan room with fitted panelling and an old timber ceiling; the “nest” beneath the Liberty decoration of the north house; the one served by a private stair, a world of its own; the one you reach by passing the old oven, the stua dele galete, where they cooked for the French in 1796; the one that looks onto the central courtyard; the one facing the walled orchard; the one with the brass kitchen corner; and the one beneath the roof truss.
The indoor waters have a name: La Caneva — the same as the cellar that the inventory of 1729 found empty, “the barrels bare and ill-kept”. Beneath those vaults, where the wine was once kept, there is now a pool. Beside it a whirlpool, the sauna, the steam room, the sensory showers, the ice fountain and the quiet room: dry heat, moist heat, and good cold. Outdoors, a second pool.
Breakfast is served from eight until half past ten, in the loggia beside the seventeenth-century well, or in the oratory garden when the season allows, or in the suite for those who prefer it. The cakes are made in the house with fruit from the walled orchard. The honesty bar is always open: you take what you like — aperitifs, beers, juices, the wines of this land — and write it down on a slip. If you take something and do not write it down, you pay nothing: it rests on your honesty, and we trust you.
You may carry anything into the walled orchard, with one courtesy we ask: no glass. A glass that breaks in the grass is a harm that cannot be undone, and so you will find elegant white goblets there, not of glass. In the orchard are the strawberry-grape pergola, the kitchen garden, and a small pond where two terrapins live, Grazia and Graziella.
Reception is open from 9 to 1 and from 2 to 7; there is no night service. Arrivals are welcomed between 2 and 7 in the afternoon, departures by 11. If you are arriving outside these hours, write to us beforehand: we will find a way.
In the courtyard lives Demi, the family corgi: she is the only animal admitted, and she will come to meet you. The house is for adults from the age of eighteen, with no exceptions — we say so beforehand, because it is the condition that makes possible the quiet we promise.
Close to everything, inside the quiet. The villa sits at the centre of three worlds and lies between seven and twenty-five minutes from each.
Lake Garda, with the harbours of Lazise and Bardolino, the Scaliger walls and the jetties; the Valpolicella and its wineries, where Amarone is made; Verona, with its squares, its bridges and its Arena. Three destinations of international draw — and the courtyard sits among them, outside their noise.
All around are the morainic hills, left by the ancient Garda glacier between the lake and the river Adige: an amphitheatre of rolling land, with vineyards, olive groves and cypresses climbing in double file, as a traveller described them in 1821. It is country to be covered slowly, on foot or by bicycle, and e-bikes can be hired at the villa.
There is no restaurant here, by choice: the table of this house is the land around it. The osterie and the wineries we recommend we have tried ourselves — we have sat at those tables, we have shaken those hands — and we book them for you, in Lazise, in Bardolino, in the Valpolicella and in Verona. It is not a concierge service: it is how this family understands hospitality, which is not to keep you within the walls but to open the right door for you.
Parking is in the courtyard, free, with charging for electric cars.
The Carminati came from the Val Brembilla, in the country of Bergamo. In 1443 the Serenissima, having taken Bergamo, razed the villages of the valley to the ground: the family, who held a stronghold and a castle there, took the road into exile. They were Ghibellines, and that allegiance cost them their land. Two centuries later they had returned to Venetian soil through the trade that carried the Bergamasque diaspora: cheese.
The deed of 26 April 1672, drawn up by the notary Andrea Bertini, records what he paid and what he bought: 1,160 ducats for “a house standing in the Villa of Piovezzan, of the master and of the labourer, with gardens, orchard, courtyard and well”. The Orci were selling to pay debts; he was buying in order to stay. In 1673 he added four fields bought from the reverend Alessandro Barila, in 1676 a share of the tithe, and by 1679 the entry in the land register was complete: a man who knows trade knows that a property is held by its rights, not by its walls.
Giuseppe Carminati died on 9 January 1729, aged eighty-eight. The inventory drawn up in those days is a bleak one: “the cellar being visited […] they found not so much as a cup, but rather the barrels bare and ill-kept”. From that emptied cellar comes the name the water rooms of the villa carry today.
The inheritance passed to his four Marinelli nephews, sons of his daughter Laura and of Giovanni Marinelli: two Bergamasque families of cheese merchants, joined by a marriage. The finest century of the estate began. In 1778 the private oratory was built to a design by Adriano Cristofoli, recognised in 1794; Luigi Trezza worked on the property; the rooms received the painted decoration still to be seen today.
The account book records the rhythm of the works, year by year. In 1791 payment is made “for building added towards the orchard, that is the fruit room” — where the fruit of the walled garden was kept. In 1792 the paving. In 1794 the boundary walls of the orchard and of the hill. And it is from a note left by the steward in 1792 that the motto is born which the house still bears: «Zanzoche non si riposi mai», may Zanzoche never rest.
In 1794 the last Doge of Venice, Lodovico Manin, signed a deed concerning this estate: the closing years of the Serenissima pass through here. Three years later Bonaparte’s ultimatum would force his abdication.
Two years afterwards the French army arrived, and of that week everything survives.
On 7 July 1796 general Masséna wrote to Count Marinelli from his headquarters at Castion:
“Having determined to establish a camp of twelve thousand men for the districts of Bussolengo and Campara, I have judged that I could place my Headquarters in no better situation than your house at Piovezzano; and I therefore beg you to be so good as to have it made ready to receive me, as soon as may be, together with my General Staff.”
The days that followed are told in the letters of the steward Giovanni Micheletti to his master, and they are the reverse side of great history. On the 11th and 12th of July two French officers inspected the rooms and the kitchen: the cook liked the courtyard oven, the stua dele galete, still to be seen today. Covers were requested for fifty, and the steward could only reply that it would have been easy, had the soldiers not already stripped everything. On the 13th the aide announced a dinner two days later for a general and for officers of the Neapolitan cavalry: that dinner was politics, meant to ease Naples out of its Austrian alliance and into a pact with France. Masséna wrote to obtain this house, and he slept in it; his noble title, Duke of Rivoli, comes from a village ten kilometres away.
A gentler memory is attached to the vine against the wall. A traveller wrote in 1856 that he had seen “a vine fastened to the wall, to whose thick and ancient stem Bonaparte, Masséna and Moreau tied the reins of their horses on returning from the repeated attacks made at Rivoli”. It is tradition, not record, and we tell it for exactly what it is.
Debt returned a century later, this time the Marinelli’s own. On 13 May 1878 the Court of Verona sold the property in five lots: the villa, valued at 40,904.88 lire, went to Francesco Orlandi of Bussolengo for 44,001. Then came the keepers — the Cagossi from 1887, the Giglioli from 1919, the Flores company from 1927 — until the Ronzetti.
A note on the name. The estate is also known as “Cà dei Frati”, the house of the friars. Some publications attribute the epithet to a supposed ownership by the Redemptorist Order: documentary research has not confirmed it, and the name more probably derives from old ecclesiastical rights over the area. We hand it on as an epithet, not as a fact.
This is a family’s house, and it shows.
It was Remo Padovani who bought it in 2001, when it was a farm complex waiting to be recovered, and who restored it entirely: the houses, the courtyard, the walled orchard, the boundary walls, the oratory. It was he who looked for water beneath the orchard, and found it. On the outer wall, towards the road, stands a shrine of Christ that he chose to restore: you see it only in passing, and in the evening it is lit. He died in 2025.
Set into the entrance floor since 1932 are the letters PR of Pietro Ronzetti. Read backwards, they are his own. A true coincidence, which we tell for exactly what it is.
There is a second symmetry, and it lies in the archives. In the eighteenth century this estate petitioned the Venetian authorities to be granted water: in a drawing of 1735 a basin in the barchessa is marked as the place “where all the water petitioned for arrives”. That basin is still in its place, dry, and today it holds flowers; the two basins along the orchard wall were waiting for the same water. It came three centuries later — from below, and not along a channel.
The villa, the walled orchard and the spring concession belong to the same family company: a single chain, from the land to the water to the house. The estate is listed and protected by the Italian heritage authority, belongs to the circuit of the Istituto Regionale per le Ville Venete and is a member of the Italian Historic Houses Association.
The house is run today by Laura, by her son Otello and by his wife Francesca. Laura tends the kitchen garden and the orchard, and the breakfast cakes carry her hand. There is no manager standing between the guests and the owners: whoever welcomes you at the door is whoever answers for this house. That is why, on these pages, we speak in the first person.
The motto of the estate comes from the eighteenth century and has not changed. «Zanzoche non si riposi mai»: the work is ours, the rest is yours.
Via Piovezzano Vecchia, 48 37010 Pastrengo (VR)