In November 1550, Girolamo Chiericati posted an entry in his ledgers for a sum paid to Andrea Palladio for drawings the architect had produced for his city palazzo at the beginning of the same year.
Work on this building began in 1551, but was suspended in 1557 when Girolamo Chiericati died. Subsequently, Girolamo's son Valerio had only the internal spaces decorated by an extraordinary group of artists that included Ridolfi, Zelotti, Fasolo, Forbicini and Battista Franco.
For over a century, palazzo Chiericati remained a majestic fragment of a building interrupted half way along its fourth bay. The palazzo was eventually completed on the basis of the drawings in Palladio's Quattro Libri at the end of the 17th century.
As an urban residence of the Renaissance period, palazzo Chiericati presents quite an extraordinary novelty, which stems from Palladio's understanding of the site on which it rises. The broad, open space in front of the building - at the edge of the city, and just in front of the river - is a context which creates a sort of ambiguity: at one and the same time, the structure can be seen as a town residence and a rural villa.

This magnificent residence, created in the period 1569-1575 for the Vicentine nobleman Montano Barbarano, is the only large urban palazzo that Andrea Palladio ever fully completed. Barbarano asked Palladio to consider the possible inclusion of various houses belonging to his family which already existed at the site of the new building and, following completion of the drawings, purchased yet another adjacent house, which eventually resulted in the asymmetric positioning of the entrance portal. In any case, constraints imposed by the site itself and also by his demanding client induced Palladio to adopt a number of rather 'courageous' and refined solutions. The architect's masterful work at this site is a sophisticated 'restructuring' project that merged various pre-existing buildings into a single complex. On the ground floor, a magnificent four-columned atrium welds together the two pre-existing buildings. For this purpose Palladio solved two problems: supporting the floor of the great hall on the piano nobile and restoring a symmetrical appearance to the atrium conditioned by the oblique course of the perimeter walls from the pre-existing houses. To decorate the palazzo, Montano subsequently commissioned some of the greatest artists of his time, including Battista Zelotti, Anselmo Canera, Andrea Vicentino and Lorenzo and Agostino Rubini, who worked in the building in various periods.

The Palladian loggia replaces a similar structure which had existed in the same position since the Middle Ages and in which there had been a covered public space at ground floor level and a meeting hall on the upper floor. Funds were allocated for the new building in April 1571 and work began immediately. Palladio delivered the final moulding template drawings in March 1572 and the roof of the building was finished by the end of the same year. Giannantonio Fasolo then painted the caissons of the coffered ceiling of the upper hall, while Lorenzo Rubini executed the stucco work and produced the statues.
Palladio's drawings for the façade facing the square and the front in Contra' del Monte were radically different and had been influenced by two very different situations. A powerful, gigantic order of columns emphasizing the vertical dimension was evidently an appropriate solution for the clear view of the building provided by the open piazza, while the narrower dimensions of the lateral front and of Contra' del Monte resulted in the choice of an order more moderate in size.

In 1546, the Consiglio of the City of Vicenza approved the drawings which Palladio had prepared for the loggias of the Palazzo della Ragione.
Palladio proposed what might be defined as an 'elastic' solution, capable of providing the necessary alignment with the openings and passageways of the internal 15th-century structure. The 'system' is based on a repetition of the Serlian arch, which is composed of an open arch of constant dimensions flanked by two rectangular openings of varying width and thus capable of absorbing any differences in bay width. This function is clearly evident in the corner arches, where the architraved openings are reduced to an absolute minimum.
With a certain rhetorical emphasis, it was Palladio himself who referred to the Palazzo della Ragione with its new stone loggias as a Basilica, as a tribute to the buildings of ancient Rome where politicians and merchants met to discuss their business. Work on the Basilica proceeded very slowly: on the north and west sides, the lower arches were completed in 1561, while those of the second storey were begun in 1564 and completed in 1597. The side facing Piazza delle Erbe was not completed until 1614.