Andrea Palladio designed the villa for Taddeo Gazzoti between 1542 and 1543. Taddeo was not noble by birth, but was an educated man and, together with Giangiorgio Trissino, a promoter of the city's architectural renewal. Gazzotti was forced to sell the villa, while still under construction, to the Venetian patrician Girolamo Grimani, who completed the works in a few years' time.
In designing the villa, Palladio needed to create an updated, coherent whole out of a house with a pre-existing tower, which was mentioned in the documents and is still clearly visible on the right-hand side of the completed building. He constructed a second tower on the opposite side of the plan, thereby creating two symmetrical apartments with three rooms each. A barrel-vaulted loggia joins the apartments to the cross-vaulted great hall.

The universal icon of Palladian villas, the Rotonda was considered by its owner, the canon Paolo Almerico, an urban residence or, more appropriately, a suburban home. In the Quattro Libri, Palladio himself included the Rotonda amongst his palazzi and not the villas. It was designed in 1566 and, although incomplete, the villa was ready for use by 1569. In 1591 it was ceded to the brothers Odorico and Marco Capra, who carried it through to completion. Scamozzi, who succeeded Palladio after 1580, completed the plans with some deviations, which recent studies however tend to consider very limited.
The Villa Rotonda is a villa-temple, an abstraction, mirroring a higher order and harmony. With its corners oriented to the four compass points, it is primarily meant to be read in terms of its volumes – a cube and a sphere – almost alluding to the primary solids in Plato's universe. There were certainly several sources for such a centrally planned residential building: from the projects by Francesco di Giorgio to Mantegna's house in Mantua and Raphael's project for the Villa Madama. The fact remains that the Villa Rotonda is unique in the architecture of all time. By building a self-contained villa, perfectly symmetrical, Palladio almost seems to have been bent on constructing an ideal model of his own architecture

In 1580 the Accademia Olimpica initiated the construction of a theatre, which had been designed by one of its members, Andrea Palladio. However, in August of that year, the architect died without being able to see the results of his work.
After Palladio's death, Vincenzo Scamozzi, who had been invited to complete the work on the theatre, created a series of streets at the back of the stage (the seven streets of Thebes) originally designed for the inauguration of the theatre in 1585. The fascinating trompe-l'oeil extension has remained beyond the proscenium as an integral part of the stage since that time.
The Palladian design is a reconstruction of a Roman theatre. The work, indeed very precise from an archaeological point of view, was also inspired by a thorough study of Vitruvius' texts and the ruins of ancient theatrical buildings. In this sense it constitutes a sort of spiritual testament to the man who had designed it. With the Teatro Olimpico the theatre of the classical age was reborn. Throughout his entire professional life, Palladio had been seeking the laws underlying the secret harmony and the 'language' of classical architecture, with which, in this particular work, he attains a very high degree of consonance and identification.

In this building, a commemorative medallion decorated with an engraved profile of Isabella Nogarola Valmarana bears the date 1566. Isabella herself had signed the construction contracts with the builders in December 1565.
The façade of palazzo Valmarana is one of Palladio's most extraordinary achievements. This is the first example of a solution in which a giant order of pilasters follows the entire vertical extension of a palazzo. The idea evidently stems from Palladio's experimentation with the fronts of religious buildings, such as the almost contemporary façade of the church of San Francesco della Vigna.
As in the church, the stratification of two systems becomes evident in the façade of palazzo Valmarana: the gigantic order of six composite pilasters seems to be superimposed on a minor order of Corinthian pilasters. This occurs in a manner far more evident at the edges, where the absence of the final pilaster reveals the underlying order supporting a bas-relief of a warrior bearing the Valmarana arms.