POMPEI, Alessandro, Conte

Italian architect, theorist, and painter. Count Alessandro Pompei studied painting under Antonio Balestra. He helped design the Villa Pindemonte a Vo at Isola della Scala in the province of Verona, and Palazzo Giuliari a Settimo di Gallese in the town of Sessino. In 1747, he designed the Oratorio delle Tre Vie, also known as the Chiesa della Rotonda (Round Church) in Sanguinetto. In Verona, he designed the Dogana, the portico of the Accademia Filarmonica, and the façade of San Paolo. In Bergamo, he designed the library of the Franciscans.

He was the author of a prominent treatise on architecture: Cinque Ordini dell’Architettura Civile di Michele Sanmicheli (Five Orders of the Civic Architecture of Michele Sanmicheli). Michele Sanmicheli was a Venetian architect.

The architect Adriano Cristofali (1717-1788) was his pupil.

Villa Pompei Carlotti: Façade

The villa was rebuilt between 1731 and 1737 according to the design of the owner, Alessandro Pompei, a patrician from Verona and a remarkable intellectual, architect, and virtuoso painter. The imposing building conforms perfectly to eighteenth-century reinterpretations of Palladian dictates; the extended fa�ade has at its centre a deep pronaos articulated by four enormous Tuscan columns supporting a canonical triangular pediment.

In 1738, after the reconstruction was completed, the brothers Alberto and Alessandro Pompei asked Antonio Balestra, a renowned Veronese painter and Alessandro’s former teacher, to create frescoes for the vast main hall. The other spaces in the villa were decorated by Balestra’s disciples.

Chiesa della Rotonda: Façade

Villa Pompei Carlotti: Façade