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The Palazzo Pompei was built a little later than the Palazzo Bevilacqua by Sanmicheli. It has a restrained seven-bay stone-faced façade with a rusticated basement with arched openings and an upper floor with fluted Doric half columns, a combination that appears in Giovanni Caroto's drawn reconstruction (1540) of the Roman theatre in Verona. The half columns are paired with pilasters at the corners, a favourite device of Sanmicheli borrowed from the Basilica Aemilia in Rome, and the arched windows between them are embellished with keystones carved as grotesque masks. From the slightly wider central bay a splendid lunette-vaulted entrance hall leads through to a courtyard, bordered on three sides by arcades, carried rather uncanonically by free-standing columns, with an upper storey where tall arched windows with massive rough-hewn keystones repeat the shape of the more refined windows of the façade.
View the ground plan of the palace.
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