361 Sentences With "piano nobile" | Random Sentence Generator

The booth, from the Piano Nobile gallery, will be Nash's biggest-ever display in New York.

"When the market gets a broader international interest, it gears up," said Robert Travers, director of Piano Nobile, a London gallery that was among the 129 exhibitors at Art London.

At the Palazzo Barbarigo in Venice, the floor above the piano nobile is of almost equal status, so it is referred to as the secondo piano nobile. In Italy, especially in Venetian palazzi, the floor above the piano nobile is sometimes referred to as the "secondo piano nobile" (second principal floor), especially if the loggias and balconies reflect those below on a slightly smaller scale. In these instances (occasionally in museums), the principal piano nobile is described as the primo piano nobile to differentiate it.

Since then he has regularly held solo shows at Piano Nobile and completed numerous commissions.

An early-15th-century piano nobile at the Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara. Its larger windows indicate its superior status compared with the rooms on the floor below. Palais Gise in Munich: the rich decor of the facade underlines the meaning of the piano nobile on the second floor. At the 18th-century Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, the piano nobile is placed above a rusticated ground floor, and reached by an external staircase.

There is a flying staircase to the piano nobile. There are lunette openings above the cornice filled with amber glass to create an ethereal light inside. Tomb chests are above the angle architraves. On the piano nobile, there is a circular chapel with Tivoli variant Corinthian order columns of rose marble and a coffered dome of stone.

Larger windows than those on other floors are usually the most obvious feature of the piano nobile. In England and Italy, the piano nobile is often reached by an ornate outer staircase, which avoided for the inhabitants of this floor the need to enter the house by the servant's floor below. Kedleston Hall is an example of this in England, as is Villa Capra "La Rotonda" in Italy. Most houses contained a secondary floor above the piano nobile, which contained more intimate withdrawing and bedrooms for private use by the family of the house, when no honoured guests were present.

It was constructed with the piano nobile on the ground floor and a mezzanine above. The north facade has a large portico of Corinthian columns. The terminating windows of the piano nobile are pedimented and recessed into shallow niches, as are the end bays of the east front. The roof, typically for the palladian style, is hidden by a balustrade.

On top of the basement sits the piano nobile, the most important and impressive floor of the building, primarily used for receiving guests. Notable to the design are the four round towers at each of the four corners of the building. These form four independent stairwells and lead from the basement up to the piano nobile and the second floor.

However, in 1800, the Wortleys complained they were unable to move in, as the architect had forgotten to build a staircase.Wortley Hall One hundred years later, a Duchess of Marlborough made the same complaint against Sir John Vanbrugh's Blenheim Palace. Both owners had rather missed the point of a house built on a 'piano nobile' design. A piano nobile is the principal floor, usually above a lower floor or semi-basement.

The palace was commissioned by Girolamo Caprara, and tradition holds that the primary layout, completed in 1603, is due to the architect Francesco Terribilia. Later refurbishments in 1705 were by Giuseppe Antonio Torri and his pupil Alfonso Torreggiani. The grand entry staircase to the piano nobile is attributed to Antonio Laghi. The piano nobile has frescoes by Petronio and his son, Pietro Paltronieri (also called il Mirandolese), Vittoria Maria Bigari (1720 c.), and Bernardo Minozzi.

The piano nobile has two rooms with frescoes attributed to Peruzzi.Cenni storico-artistici di Siena e suoi suburbia, Editore Onorato Porri, Siena, page 56. The third floor has 19th century frescoes.

Three rooms of the Piano nobile still retain 17th-century frescoes by Giulio Carpioni. The main collection includes 65,000 items of historical significance, plus designs, and a library.Beni Culturali, entry on museum.

The stairs lead to the piano nobile, dining room, oval salon, and lavishly decorated Beaux-Arts ballroom. The servants quarters on the fourth floor (attic) were renovated into rooms available for overnight guests.

Hence rooms that were adequately lit by one window, had only one, as a second might have improved the external appearance but could have made a room cold or draughty. As a result, the few windows on the piano nobile, although symmetrically placed and balanced, appear lost in a sea of brickwork; albeit these yellow bricks were cast as exact replicas of ancient Roman bricks expressly for Holkham. Above the windows of the piano nobile, where on a true Palladian structure the windows of a mezzanine would be, there is nothing. The reason for this is the double height of the state rooms on the piano nobile; however, not even a blind window, such as those often seen in Palladio's own work, is permitted to alleviate the severity of the facade.

Lathom House, Lancashire. Built in 1724 for Thomas Bootle by Leoni. A Palladian mansion with a rusticated basement and a flight of steps leading to the piano nobile. Linked by colonnades to secondary wings.

Piano nobile of Buckingham Palace. The areas defined by shaded walls represent lower minor wings. Note: This is an unscaled sketch plan for reference only. Proportions of some rooms may slightly differ in reality.

Today its construction is primarily attributed to Cantone, while the fireplace on the piano nobile and the courtyard remain attributed to Castello. The piano nobile features the fresco Legate of Obertus Spinola to Frederik I Barbarossa by Andrea Semino and frescoes by Luca Cambiasi. Palazzo Doria was the only palace in Strada Nuova to be seriously damaged by the French naval bombing in 1684, which required a serious renovation, completed by architect Gio. Antonio Ricca with the adding of a story and the redesign of the façade .

The province of Bologna acquired the site in 1970 to create the museum.Museo della civiltà contadina, official site. The "Salone delle Feste" of the piano nobile of the villa was frescoed in the 19th century.Comune of Bentivoglio.

Indeed, these houses often did have a grand staircase, but it was external—the elaborate flights of stone steps to the main entrance on the piano nobile. From photographs of Wortley Hall, one can see the large, tall windows of the 'piano nobile' on the lower floor, and the much smaller windows of the secondary rooms above. It did not require a 'grand' staircase'. Wortley Hall survives today as an hotel; the owners still tell the story of the forgetful architect. Among Leoni’s other designs is Alkrington Hall in Middleton, now in Greater Manchester.

Southern facade of the Shore Theater. From bottom to top: the ground floor, double-height piano nobile, four levels of offices, and the attic The southern portion of the Shore Theater (facing Surf Avenue) housed the offices, while the northern portion (away from Surf Avenue) housed the theater. The ground level contained storefronts housed within several bays. Above the ground floor is a double-height piano nobile along the southern and part of the eastern and western facades, which contains semicircular-topped windows corresponding to the bays below.

It was originally built in the 16th century. It is distinguished by its mosaics of Murano glass applied in 1886. At the time it was owned by the proprietors of one of the glass factories, who were inspired by the exterior mosaics on the facade of St Mark's Basilica to apply those to the palace. The palazzo follows the Renaissance pattern of design on three floors: an open loggia gives access to the canal surmounted by a piano nobile with open loggias and decorated columns, with a "secondo piano nobile" (secondary floor) above.

The villa's rear façade, with paired entry stairways to the piano nobile. The Limonaia—potted lemon garden, at the villa's front. avenue (allée) of garden axis, to villa. Villa Cetinale is a 17th-century Baroque villa and Italiana gardens in Tuscany.

Flanking the central section are two identical wings on three floors, each three windows wide, the windows of the first-floor piano nobile being the tallest. Adam's design for this facade contains huge "movement" and has a delicate almost fragile quality.

The Beletage of Dresden's Villa Martha, built in the 1870s. In Germany, there is the Beletage (meaning "beautiful storey", from the French term bel étage), which fulfilled the same function as the piano nobile. Both date to the 17th century.

The structure of the building consists of a concrete-encased steel frame of columns and reinforced concrete slabs. The external masonry walls of the building are non-load bearing and merely support their own weight. The design of the principal facades in Gloucester and Essex Streets are divided into three architectural zones mirroring the exaggerated ground floor, piano nobile and attic storey of the Florentine Early Renaissance palazzo type. At Science House the exaggerated "ground storey" comprises the Ground Floor and Floor 1; the piano nobile Floors 2, 3 and 4 the attic storey, Floor 5.

The villa was erected in 1820 with design by Luigi Canonica. The façade has monumental ionic pilasters arising from the Piano Nobile and two flanking wings extend forward. The rear has a large public garden. The interiors include a large oval salon.

The idea of a grotto was originally a means to enhance a dank undercroft, or provide an antechamber before a piano nobile, but later it became a garden feature independent of the house, sometimes on the edge of a lake, with water flowing through it.

Stamperia di Longhi (1792), page 15. In 1732, the palace was refurbished by Alfonso Torreggiani for the Princesses Benedetta and Amalia d'Este of Modena. His contribution is noted in the window frames of the piano nobile. The Abate frescoes were destroyed by Torregiani's reconstruction.

The alteration of the Palace-City Hall also changed its interior. The basement got a separate entrance at the east side. The piano nobile was completely rearranged. In the northern wing two wedding rooms were built. In the southern wing the mayor’s office was constructed.

The George Street facade also contains five window bays. The three central ones are recessed rather than projecting. The larger openings below the "piano nobile" are arched, with small square openings above them except the main entrance. The stone facing on this section resembles ashlar.

On the facade are the coat of arms of the Medici; the city coat of arms with red and white checkers is upheld by a bear, symbol of Pistoia as opposed to Florentine Lion, at the base of the main staircase. In 1637, a piano nobile corridor linking to the church was constructed. Meter and Double Braccio measure on wall Supposedly the marble bust that was posted to the right of the central facade window on the piano nobile, represents the infamous Filippo Tedici, considered the traitor of Pistoia for having sold the town to the Lucchese condotierre Castruccio Castracani. He was killed and decapitated in battle, after Castruccio's death.

The piano nobile is usually the first storey (in European terminology; second floor in American terms), or sometimes the second storey, located above a ground floor (often rusticated) containing minor rooms and service rooms. The reasons for this were so the rooms would have finer views, and more practically to avoid the dampness and odours of the street level. This is especially true in Venice, where the piano nobile of the many palazzi is especially obvious from the exterior by virtue of its larger windows and balconies, and open loggias. Examples of this are Ca' Foscari, Ca' d'Oro, Ca' Vendramin Calergi, and Palazzo Barbarigo.

Unlike the Trianons, Sanssouci was designed to be a whole unto itself. The south facing garden façade. Frederick the Great ignored his architect's advice to place the piano nobile upon a low ground floor. As a result, the palace failed to take maximum advantage of its location.

The palace was two stories tall. The lower story was a single space, perhaps a granary, with column bases supporting the story above. Flooring remnants indicate the second story may have been the piano nobile. The roofs were tiled, as they had been in Roman times.

His works in the US include the Abercrombie Residence, a classical mansion based on Marble Hill House, Twickenham, London. Complete with a piano nobile approached by an external staircase, it has a pediment supported by Corinthian columns. The house is constructed of Kasota limestone, with Indiana limestone dressings.

The statuary at the top of the stairs is by Gabriele Bunelli. The piano nobile has a room painted with quadratura (1684) by Francesco Galli Bibiena and other rooms were frescoed by Angelo Michele Colonna.Biblioteca Salaborsa entry for palace. Part of the palace is now used for exhibitions.

Only two wings survive from this residential representative town residence - western and the short southern. The ground floor was both residential and used for storage. The staircase included baroque stone sculptures of saints until the 1930s. First floor is the representative piano nobile with preserved rococo-classical interior decorations.

The reception rooms, the piano nobile (or belle etage), on the main floor, were fully refurbished in the second half of the 19th century by the architects Ludwig and Hugo Ernst Wächtler. They display beautiful ceramic stoves, parquet flooring, and late historicist wooden plaques in Old German forms.

The internal decoration preserves original 16th century elements, such as the portals, the frescoes in the piano nobile showing the achievements of Doge Ambrogio Di Negro against the Corsicans, and the grotesque paintings in the other rooms. Some 18th century elements are also visible, such as stucco decorations.

A decorated frieze runs below the cornice which separates the two floors. The second floor functions as a piano nobile. Its windows are in rectangular recessed openings topped by segmental pediments and recessed oval attic windows. All the lower stories have one-over-one double-hung sash windows.

From the entrance hall, the main staircase () led to the audience chambers of the princely family in the piano nobile, and from there to the mezzanine to the sumptuously furnished Grand Salon. The suite of the prince was in the piano nobile of the right wing of the palace, the princess's suite was of the left. The civil administration and government archives were housed in the Rez-de-Chaussee of the right wing; the left wing housed the administration of the regiment William Henry maintained on behalf of the King of France. The storage rooms were in the basement and could be accessed from the courtyard via a door in front of the stables and a side staircase.

From this Dunning concludes, "Work... seems to belong to, or at the very least to have been finished in, the early years of the Restoration." The most noticeable similarity between Jones's documented work and Brympton d'Evercy is the use of alternating triangular and segmental window pediments, but Jones only ever used this motif to give importance to the windows of the piano nobile, for at Brympton d'Evercy the alternating pediments give both floors equal value. The piano nobile at Brympton is most unusual in being on the ground floor. It is doubtful that a master architect who had designed for the Royal family, and the highest echelons of the aristocracy, would have considered such a placing.

It was assessed for rating purposes (i.e. for property taxes) as the most valuable private house in London. The completed building was three floors in height, the State rooms being on the first floor or piano nobile, family living rooms on the ground floor and family bedrooms on the second floor.

He was commissioned to rebuild Hampstead Marshall, Berkshire, for William Craven, 1st Earl of Craven (1608–1697), but died there, with the structure still in the works: the piano nobile had not yet been begun. It was completed by Captain William Winde, but suffered a disastrous fire in 1718 (Colvin).

The palace was designed in 1775 by Carlo Bianconi. The grand staircase has quadratura by Giovanni Santi and Francesco Santini with stucco decoration (1790) by Luigi Acquisti (1790). The piano nobile has a room decorated with a fresco depicting Olympus by Giuseppe Maria Roli and Giacomo Alboresi.Biblioteca Salaborsa, entry on palace.

This palace is now occupied by the Archdiocese of Florence. The corner has a coat of arms of Pope Leo X sculpted by Baccio da Montelupo.Palazzo Spinelli, notes on Palazzo Pucci. On the arch of the piano nobile (first floor) above the entrance portal is the coat of arms of the Pucci family.

Bentivar is a historic home and farm located near Charlottesville, Albemarle County, Virginia. It is a one-story, double-pile brick residence, with English basement and clearstory attic. It has a Palladian piano nobile plan. The traditional date for the building of Bentivar is 1795, but rebuilt about 1830 after a fire.

This building was commissioned by the Sampieri family in the 15th century. The facade has teracotta decorations. In 1614 the palace was acquired by the Cospi, who commissioned fresco decoration (circa 1670) of the piano nobile by Angelo Michele Colonna and Giacomo Alboresi. Other fresco decoration provided by Domenico Pedrini and Francesco Stagni.

The uppermost windows indicate that the upper floor is of far lower status. The piano nobile (Italian for "noble floor" or "noble level", also sometimes referred to by the corresponding French term, bel étage) is the principal floor of a palazzo. This floor contains the main reception and bedrooms of the house.

The U-shaped layout we see today was built by the early 1700s. The interior had a chapel dedicated to Saint Catherine. The east wing has a monumental staircase leading to the piano nobile. The property was inherited by Giuseppe Gorini Corio who married Catterina Aliprandi, a widow elder than he was.

The facade above is ten bays wide, with a piano nobile stretched over seven floors. Each bay contains a double hung sash window. Construction is brick, with a limestone bandcourse every two floors and rusticated granite quoining on the corners. A double- molded bandcourse separates the main section from the upper two floors.

Blenheim Palace was the birthplace of the 1st Duke's famous descendant, Winston Churchill, whose life and times are commemorated by a permanent exhibition in the suite of rooms in which he was born (marked "K" on the plan). Blenheim Palace was designed with all its principal and secondary rooms on the piano nobile, thus there is no great staircase of state: anyone worthy of such state would have no cause to leave the piano nobile. Insofar as Blenheim does have a grand staircase, it is the series of steps in the Great Court which lead to the North Portico. There are staircases of various sizes and grandeur in the central block, but none are designed on the same scale of magnificence as the palace.

The Palazzo Felicini is a Renaissance style palace in Via Riva di Reno 79 in central Bologna, Italy. Detail of a capital of the palace. Photo by Paolo Monti, 1969. Like many of the palaces in the crowded center of Bologna, the piano nobile and facade extends up to the street over an arcaded front.

Above all, the accouterment of the piano nobile was modernized. Nevertheless, the Planetary Room and the entire cycle of ceiling paintings remained almost unchanged. Thus, the works limited themselves to wall decorations, stoves and pieces of furniture. In keeping with the taste of the times, three East Asian cabinets were introduced and the state rooms received new wall coverings.

The second floor was designed to be of considerably less importance than the piano nobile below, which is indicated externally by the smaller windows. However, unlike in a Baroque house of just a few years earlier, it was not reserved for lesser guests, children and servants, as is evident by its approach from a monumentally grand staircase.

Russborough was designed by Cassels for Joseph Leeson, 1st Earl of Milltown. It was built between 1741 and 1755. A central block containing the principal rooms is flanked by curved and segmented colonnades leading to two symmetrical service blocks. The main entrance, at the centre of one of Cassels's trademark 'suggested' porticoes, is on a raised piano nobile.

A plaster cast of a lion, symbol of the Venetian Republic, stands in the center of the room. The first floor of the building is the Piano nobile with reception rooms for guests and delegations. There are paintings on the walls and ceilings, stucco and wooden ceilings. The rooms have an excellent view over the Grand Canal.

The site for the villa had some housing when it was bought by a member of the Muratori by the mid 1700s. In 1777, Angelo Venturoli was engaged to build a villa. The building quotes from Palladian structures such as a large window on piano nobile, but maintains a general neoclassic severity. The facade has four monumental ionic columns.

Oxford Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, 2nd edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, p. 204. . The grandest and finest rooms are often on the first floor above the ground level: this floor is the piano nobile. The corps de logis is usually flanked by lower secondary wings, such as the barchesse of Venetian villas.

Mazzetti worked also on the dining room's stuccos, where he represented mythological scenes in pale colours and very realistic and colourful animals to adorn the ceiling. Musica a Palazzo, a cultural association of classical musicians, has leased the piano nobile since 2005 and uses it for small-scale opera productions.Bing, Alison, Venice Encounter, Lonely Planet, 2009, p. 56.

Bramham Park from Jones's Views of the Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen (1829). A carriage ramp on the entrance facade conveys visitors to the principal entrance on the piano nobile. The Baroque mansion was built in 1698 for Robert Benson, 1st Baron Bingley. It has remained in the ownership of Benson's descendants since its completion in 1710.

The home has successive layers where the degree of facade decoration matches the function of the interiors. The ground floor is rustic stone, almost fortress-like. The second floor, the piano nobile, is decorated with doric columns. The Palazzo Vidoni-Caffarelli conserves 16th-century frescoes in its Charles V hall that depict events in the life of the emperor.

130 Another important building was a palazzetto at n. 121-22 erected by Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572-85) as a residence for the staff of the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia; it had a rusticated ground floor, windows on the piano nobile with alternate triangular and curved tympanums and an arched attic.Gigli (1990), p.

The interior of the Ponte San Pietro building has a large staircase leading to a piano nobile frescoed by Vincenzo Angelo Orelli, Paolo Vincenzo Bonomini, and Agostino Comerio. The villa has long held the family's significant works of art, with Alex Mapelli Mozzi (b. 1951) – also of Ponte San Pietro – working internationally as an art dealer and curator.

The free adaptation by Cacialli allowed him to supplement the original piano nobile with luminous peristyle including stuccowork and wall paintings. With the return of the House of Lorraine in 1814, the previously designed chapel and guard house were at last built, and a number of rooms were embellished by the painters Domenico Nani and Giorgio Angiolini.Cresti, p.378.

The Sacchetti family has been in possession of the palace since then until 2015: in that year, part of the palace corresponding to the entire piano nobile inherited by Giovanna Zanuso, spouse of the deceased Giulio Sacchetti, was sold to the banker Robert De Balkany. After the latter's death it has been put on sale again by Sotheby's.

It is symmetrical and rectangular-plan in the classical tradition. The exterior is coursed, tooled sandstone with ashlar dressings; decorative features include band courses above and below piano nobile, V-jointed angle quoins, eaves cornice and architraved windows. There is a Doric entrance porch on the west side. Cast-iron torchere lamp standards with nautical finials flank the entrance.

Borrowing also from Renaissance architecture, the building uses a piano nobile, or raised ground floor, which is accessed by marble steps. Immediately before the steps is a fountain in the shape of a boat. The main house is built in a horseshoe around a central patio containing another ornamental fountain. Santos ruled Uruguay from 1882 until 1886.

The first phase of construction included the Octagon facade. This first building has three main storeys, the ground or basement constructed of Port Chalmers breccia with the floors above built of Oamaru limestone. There was a central entrance at the first floor level – the piano nobile in architectural terms - reached by a double flight of steps from the street.

On the exterior, little differentiation between floors is made: there is no obviously visible piano nobile. On the garden front, access to the park is from the central recessed portico only; a balustrade above a deep ditch keeps out informal wanderers. The Villa Pisani at Montagnana from I quattro libri dell'architettura, Giacomo Leoni, 1742. Not built as planned.

Exterior of the Palazzo Venturi Gallerani The Palazzo Venturi Gallerani is an 18th-century palace on via delle Cerchia #6, near the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, Tuscany, Italy. The palace is presently occupied by private residences. The palace was erected in 1790, commissioned by Giuseppe Venturi Gallerani. The Piano Nobile was frescoed during 1793-1794 by the neoclassical painter Luigi Ademollo.

The exaggerated "ground storey" is built of fine quality ashlar sandstone masonry with rusticated joints. In Gloucester Street, the windows have semi-circular heads rising through two storeys. A decorative metal grille fills the semi-circular arches; below the windows have steel frames. The piano nobile at Science House is stretched through three floors and has the most simple architectural treatment.

159 - 176. Valguarnera, built around a courtyard with long curving arms that reference both the earlier villas of Palladio and Bernini's Piazza for St. Peter's in Rome. The three storeyed main facade of the villa has a concave bay at its centre, in which is set an external staircase leading to the piano nobile. The balustraded roof line is adorned by statuary.

The facade made by Borromini The building houses the chapel of the Biblical Magi, built by Borromini. On the outside, a ridge marks the separation between the ground floor and piano nobile. On the facade by Borromini, composed of pilasters, concave and convex curves in the windows design are alternating ; it is one of the most famous examples of Italian Baroque architecture.

Only the northwest wing and the northeast façade remain of the 16th century structure. During the last part of the 19th century, a large part of the castle was destroyed. The Renaissance courtyard, the main staircase and the reception hall, and the frescoes on the piano nobile remain. In 1983, an earthquake caused considerable damage to the building, requiring extensive restructuring.

Construction began in 1679, when the Prince was 51 years old. The decorations over the windows of the piano nobile recall the campaign of the Carignano family with Carignan-Salières Regiment against the Iroquois in 1667. The interior has always been described as lavish and has splendid frescoes and stucco decorations. Among the frescoes are some by Stefano Legnani, called il Legnanino.

From the 1760s Palladianism was slowly superseded by Neoclassicism. A defining feature of the Neoclassical house was the absence of the first floor piano nobile. This was in part due to the picturesque values then coming into vogue. During this—the era of Humphrey Repton's idyllic landscapes—it became desirable to step from any of the main rooms directly into the landscape.

Osborne Wells House is a historic home located at Newberry, Newberry County, South Carolina. It was built about 1860, and is a brick and stucco residence consisting of a piano nobile over a raised basement. It features a projecting raised porch supported by four stuccoed brick piers. It was built by Osborne Wells, a prominent 19th century Newberry builder, planter, and brick manufacturer.

It follows the Renaissance pattern of design on four floors: a hallway floor giving access to the palace from the fondamenta is surmounted by two Piano nobiles and a fourth story above them: :- the primo piano nobile, typical of Venetian neo-Renaissance style, is made of decorated columns and eight monofora windows of which four are component of an open loggia with balcony, this floor is hosting magnificent ceremonial rooms; :- the "secondo piano nobile" (secondary floor) has four monofora windows surrounding a large quadrifora closed loggia, it hosts more intimate reception spaces; :- the fourth story is of much simpler exterior design, it has eight square windows without applied decoration. The "U"-shaped back facade is made of two paralleled wings surrounding a large garden ending onto the back canal with a richly decorated crenated wall with arched gates to the Chiesa degli Ognissanti.

Leoni reconstructed Lyme in an early form of what was to become known as the Palladian style, with the secondary, domestic and staff rooms on a rusticated ground floor, above which was a piano nobile, formally accessed by an exterior double staircase from the courtyard. Above the piano nobile were the more private room and less formal rooms for the family. In a true Palladian house (one villa designed by Palladio himself), the central portion behind the portico would contain the principal rooms, while the lower flanking wings were domestic offices usually leading to terminating pavilions which would often be agricultural in use. It was this adaption of the wings and pavilions into the body of the house that was to be a hallmark of the 18th- century Palladianism that spread across Europe, and of which Leoni was an early exponent.

Guida di Siena e dei suoi dintorni, Enrico Torrini, editor (1907) page 73. Above entrance, coat of arms of Piccolomini (Papal tiara and keys with tassel, plus shield with 5 crescents on a cross) The palace was bought and refurbished by the Bank of Italy in 1884. The Piano Nobile received some neo-Renaissance frescoes in the 19th century. The architect was Augusto Corbi.

The -story mansion is situated on a polygonal corner site along a street with other imposing residences. The facades of the building are composed of Harvard brick timed in limestone and white-painted wood. The exterior features an Ionic portico, a fanlight doorway, a side loggia, a piano nobile with iron balconies and arcaded windows. The ceremonial interiors are arranged around an open stair hall.

Basildon Park, the East front. The principal facade is the long West facade of the corps de logis and its flanking pavilions. Built of Bath stone, the three-storied rectangular corps de logis has a rusticated ground floor, with a piano nobile above and a bedroom floor above this. This block is of seven bays; the central three bays are behind a recessed Ionic portico.

Behind the façade, they are separated by an alley which, through a sottoportego, or portico-tunnel, connects to the central portal. The two sub-palaces share numerous decorative features with the annexed Ca' Foscari. They have an L-shaped plan with four floors, the upper ones having mullioned windows. At the piano nobile they form a six-arches arcade with an interwoven motif of multi-lobes circles.

However some of the main rooms in the piano nobile are maintained as a small museum property by the Fondazione Horak. The facade has a central balcony and tympanum; the latter has a coat of arms of the Costa Family. The work has a sobriety that hints of Neoclassicism. The grand staircase entry has the statues of Aphrodite, Juno, Flora and Pomona in the niches.

The chapel was dedicated to the Immaculate Conception. It may have been designed by Andrea Belli, as it is similar in style to other works by this architect. If not for the chapel's dome, surmounted by balustrades, the villa would be easily mistaken for a rustic farmhouse. This first floor contains a typical piano nobile with three-centred arches and large rooms with high ceilings.

The spacious Renaissance-style palace stands three stories high with direct access to the Grand Canal available by gondolas. The beauty and balance of the building's façade are exceptional. Classically inspired columns divide each level facing the canal. Two pairs of tall French doors divided by a single column topped by arches and a trefoil window rest above the doors on the piano nobile and upper levels.

The first floor, being the piano nobile, is distinguished by windows taller than those of the floors above and below. Each window is divided from its neighbour by a pilaster. The repetitive monotony of the long elevations is broken only by symmetrically placed slightly projecting bays, many with their own small portico. This theme has been constant during all subsequent rebuilding and alterations to the palace.

The Potemkin Stairs in Odessa, Ukraine In architecture, a perron generally refers to an external stairway to a building. Curl notes three more-specific usages: the platform-landing reached by symmetrical flights of steps leading to the piano nobile of a building; the steps themselves; or the platform base of edifices like a market cross.Curl, James Stevens (2006). Oxford Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, 2nd ed.

An upper floor is merely hinted at by small rectangular, mezzanine type, windows above those of the piano nobile. Each casino is then crowned by a tower or lantern in the summit of the pantiled roof. These elaborate square lanterns too have pilasters, and windows both real and blind. Each of these casini, in their severe Mannerist style, was built by a different unrelated owner.

Casa Guidi Drawing Room. Casa Guidi is a writer's house museum in the 15th- century patrician house in Piazza San Felice, 8, near the south end of the Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy. The piano nobile apartment was inhabited by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning between 1847 and Mrs Browning's death in 1861. Their only child, Robert Barrett Browning (known as Pen) was born there in 1849.

The piano nobile is larger in height, and the galleries contain taller, Corinthian columns and a cast-iron balustrade. A classically inspired balustrade caps the building. The interior of the building is H-shaped in plan and was originally designed to provide space for the Customs Service and the Post Office. Extant original elements include the elaborate cast-iron, double-return stair leading to the second floor.

The Carli Mansion (; ) is a mansion in Koper, a port town in southwestern Slovenia. It is named after the family of the historian and encyclopedist Gian Rinaldo Carli, who was born in it in 1720. It is an example of the Baroque architecture, with a balcony in the piano nobile, decorated with a three- mullioned window. Its inner court, decorated with frescoes, has a fountain from 1418.

The cornice has a notched frame and a long frieze with the Belloni coat of arms. At the top are two symmetrical, obelisk- shaped pinnacles: this theme is featured in a minority of palaces in Venice, such as Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, also designed by Longhena, and Palazzo Papadopoli. Internally, there are 19th-century frescoes in the piano nobile and a private oratory with painted decorations.

It is pure neoclassical architecture, as established in England since 1760, and it was a sign of things to come. Illustration 21: Palazzo Belmonte Riso (1784), restrained late Sicilian Baroque with more dominant neoclassical features. The upper windows have neoclassical pediments, while the piano nobile has Baroque pediments and a balcony with decorated corbels. The pilasters have decorated Baroque capitals, but are otherwise simple and unadorned.

These windows have low flat pediments. Each end of the facade is defined by "corner stone" decoration giving a suggestion that the single-bay wings project forward. The single windows here are topped by a true pointed pediment. Above this floor is a further almost mezzanine floor, its small unpedimented windows aligning with the larger below, serve to emphasise the importance of the piano nobile.

The building is constructed from limestone ashlar with hipped Welsh slate roofs and comprises a square main block with flanking pavilions. The north front has a rusticated basement below a piano nobile, with mezzanine and attic floor over. The house is described by English Heritage as "one of the finest Palladian houses in Wiltshire". It has a Roman Catholic chapel and a rare rotunda staircase.

The north facade of the Café is characterized by two arcades with Doric columns. There are four lions carved by the Roman sculptor Giuseppe Petrelli. In the square in front of the Cafe, Jappelli, had designed a fountain with a statue of Hebe by Canova, but the project was never realized. A staircase leads to the right loggia on the top floor, or Piano Nobile.

Both Specchi and de Sanctis were closely involved with the design of grand exterior staircases, common to Italian buildings with a second-story piano nobile, and the climate completely negating the requirement for an internal entrance hall on the ground floor in order to provide quick easy access. De Sanctis had taken this feature one step further in 1723 with his design for the Spanish steps in Rome. This grand staircase approach to a building was to be invaluable in Sicily, not only for the practical reasons of entering the piano nobile, but also for the creation of a grand approach to churches and cathedrals, where the topography of the site permits such a feature. Palazzo San Giuliano - Catania The ground floor of the Palazzo degli Elefanti in Catania (already in construction when Vaccarini came to the project) shows the decorated rustication in a 16th-century Sicilian fashion.

Refurbishment of the interiors were pursued in the 19th century in a Neoclassical-style by the architect Agostino Fantastici under commission from the Piccolomini-Clementini family. The piano nobile was frescoed (circa 1830-35) by Cesare MaffeiSoprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici e per il Paesaggio di Siena e Grosseto, entry on palace. with Scenes from the Life of Achilles.Cenni storico-artistici di Siena e suoi suburbii, Ettore Romaganoli, 1840, page 43.

In other projects, he collaborated with Alessandro Gherardini, Filippo Maria Galleti, Giovanni Andrea Brunori, and Giovanni Sacconi. In the palace of Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri on via Ghibellina, he worked with Lorenzo del Moro in decorating some murals (1708). With the same artist he worked (1702) in the piano nobile of the Palazzo Incontri. With Andrea Landini in 1700, he helped paint the wall decorations of the Villa Feroni.

The palace has 365 exterior windows, one for each day of the year. Of these, 52 are on the 24 rooms of the piano nobile representing the weeks of one year. The 2nd storey contains these 24 state rooms in a ring-shaped arrangement which symbolize the hours in a single day. Every floor in the building bares exactly 31 rooms counting the maximum number of days in a calendar month.

The interiors, however, are richly frescoed; the paintings were completed (1582–1587) by a team of painters led by Bernardino Campi. Each room has a specific dominant theme, but the entirety represents a wide sampling of classic pagan antique mythology. Ascending via a marble staircase, one reaches the Camerino dei Cesari on the piano nobile. On the wall is Rome Triumphant with Winged Victory, flanked by two subdued stone barbarians.

The piece de resistance of the villa however, is a large terrace and parterre, also designed by Napoli, overlooking the bay and Solunto, this is considered to be the finest view in Sicily. The Villa Palagonia, the larger and more complex of the two, has curved facades of two storeys. The piano nobile is denoted by large arched windows. The rear facade is a great curve, flanked by two straight wings.

Plaque on the auberge Auberge d'Angleterre is built in the Melitan style, based on traditional Maltese architecture, and it has a similar layout as Auberge de France. It is a two-storey building with rooms built around a central courtyard. The piano nobile is located at the first floor. It has a plain façade with a doorway topped by a circular window and flanked by windows on each side.

It has since gone through many owners, including Giacomo Capece Galeota, a regent in the Tribunal of the Vicariate. The initial architect was Giovanni Fillippo De Adinolfo, followed by Giovanni Francesco Mormando and Giovanni Francesco Di Palma who completed the work in the 16th century. The base of the structure has rough piperno rock. The piano nobile has the largest windows, while the third floor has arched windows.

In 1830 the marchese Giovan Battista Costabili Containi bought and restored the palace. In 1916, count Francesco Mazza acquired the palace and it underwent multiple transitions and included a mental institute, supermarket, and movie theater. In 2006, the palace reopened after restoration; it is now home to the faculty of economics of the University of Ferrara. The piano nobile still has frescoed rooms, including some by Francesco Saraceni.

The front of the palace measures across, by deep, by high and contains over of floorspace. There are 775 rooms, including 188 staff bedrooms, 92 offices, 78 bathrooms, 52 principal bedrooms, and 19 state rooms. It also has a post office, cinema, swimming pool, doctor's surgery, and jeweller's workshop. The principal rooms are contained on the piano nobile behind the west-facing garden façade at the rear of the palace.

Girouard, p.196 Completed in 1756, the exterior of this mansion was similar to those of many of the great palazzi in Italian cities: bland and featureless, the piano nobile distinguishable only by its tall pedimented windows. This arrangement, devoid of pilasters and a pediment giving prominence to the central bays at roof height, was initially too severe for the English taste, even by the fashionable Palladian standards of the day.

One house over on Via Galliera 4, the Palazzo Torfanini has a Renaissance architecture ground arcade, but a piano nobile refurbished with windows by the same architect Torreggiani. Further down the street on Via Galliera 10 is the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The cardinal's once large art collection mainly made its way to the National Gallery of London. The library was dispersed by the middle of the 19th century.

Above this colonnade is the enclosed balcony of the principal salon on the piano nobile. The columns and arches of this balcony have capitals which in turn support a row of quatrefoil windows; above this balcony is another enclosed balcony or loggia of a similar yet lighter design. The palace has (like other similar buildings in Venice) a small inner courtyard. The neighboring palace is Palazzo Giustinian Pesaro.

The Greek Doric of the house's west portico is the earliest example of the Greek revival in Britain. The late 18th century was a period of change in the interior design of English country houses. The Baroque concept of the principal floor, or piano nobile, with a large bedroom suite known as the state apartments, was gradually abandoned in favour of smaller, more private bedrooms on the upper floors.Girouard p 230.

These take advantage of the vistas over the racecourse to Breakfast Creek and the Brisbane River beyond. The front of the building addresses Queens Road to the north. The principal entrance is via a flight of centrally- positioned front steps leading to the piano nobile. Internally the house comprises 15 main rooms on 3 levels, with a wide vestibule/hallway running centrally north-south through the house on each level.

The internal decoration, still well preserved, includes the 17th century frescoes at the piano nobile by Domenico Piola and Gregorio De Ferrari, the latter credited with the most notable fresco in the central room, featuring Time and the Seasons. On the ground floor, renovated in the neoclassical style 18th century by Tagliafichi, there is a large room opened to the garden and decorated by Giovanni Barabino and Michele Canzio.

The first floor is a limestone piano nobile, while the other floor exteriors are mostly brick. A stone course above the second story separates it from the other floors. The east and west facade feature five bays of windows (three are doubled), while the north and south feature seven (five doubled). On the west facade, which faces the Fox River, a two-story porch is cantilevered over the river.

The palace was commissioned by a rich merchant and Marquis of the Dosi family, and built during 1742-1749 using designs of the painter and architect Giovanni Battista Natali. The palace entrance includes a scenic interior staircase leading to the Piano Nobile. It contains a vedute by Antonio Contestabili. The large salon is decorated with Rococo stucco work, and painted with mythologic frescoes with quadratura by Natali and figures by Giuseppe Galeotti.

It seems all façades were to have a giant order of pilasters rising at least two storeys to the full height of the piano nobile, "a grandiloquent feature unprecedented in private palace design".Jones & Penny:224(quotation)-226 Raphael asked Marco Fabio Calvo to translate Vitruvius's Four Books of Architecture into Italian; this he received around the end of August 1514. It is preserved at the Library in Munich with handwritten margin notes by Raphael.

Menzel, 1852, depicts Frederick the Great playing the flute in his music room at Sanssouci. In the Baroque tradition, the principal rooms (including the bedrooms) are all on the piano nobile, which at Sanssouci was the ground floor by Frederick's choice. While the secondary wings have upper floors, the corps de logis occupied by the King occupies the full height of the structure. Comfort was also a priority in the layout of the rooms.

Palazzo Isnello, main facade. Palazzo Isnello (also known as Palazzo Termine d'Isnello or Palazzo Sant'Antimo al Cassaro) is an historic palazzo situated between the ancient via del Cassaro and Piazza Borsa, in the Kalsa quarter of Palermo, Sicily. On the piano nobile of the house, the vault of the ballroom is frescoed with an Apotheosis of Palermo, one of seven monumental representations of the Genius of Palermo, ancient numen of the city.

The house had an L-plan, the main wing facing west standing on the footprint of the Tudor house, with a south wing at right- angles to it. The ground floor of the west wing retained the former vaulted undercroft of the west range of the medieval abbey, and contained the kitchens and areas for the storage of wines and beers. The first floor was the piano nobile, containing the main reception rooms.

The Westpac Bank building is a six storeyed masonry building located on the corner of Queen and George Streets. The structure is steel- framed with reinforced concrete floors. It contains Neo-classical elements that were common in bank architecture of this period. The main facades comprise Helidon freestone as a stone facing on a base of Uralla polished granite, that on Queen Street incorporating a "piano nobile" of giant order Ionic columns.

There are ceilings by Robert AdamLord Coventry also employed Adam in the country, at his seat of Croome Court, Worcestershire. in rooms on the piano nobile. Thomas Cundy the Elder effected some remodelling, probably in 1810-11.Pevsner, ibid.. According to Charles Dickens, Jr., writing in 1879:Charles Dickens, Jr., Dickens's Dictionary of London (1879) During the Second World War, the club was briefly the home of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.

Please follow to Pinacoteca Nazionale in Ferrara for more details. The Pinacotecta Nazionale is the national art gallery of Ferrara, also located in the Emilia-Romagna region on the piano nobile (or first floor) of Biagio Rossetti's Renaissance jewel, the Palazzo dei Diamanti. (commissioned by Leonello d’Este in 1447). It was founded in 1836 by the Municipality of Ferrara after Napoleon’s widespread dissolution of churches threatened the protection of important public artworks.

Plain windows embellish the piano nobile as well as the attic. The central building of the villa is framed by two symmetrical long, lower colonnaded wings, or barchesses, which originally housed agricultural facilities, like granaries, cellars, and other service areas. This was a working villa like Villa Badoer and a number of the other designs by Palladio. Both wings end with tall dovecotes which are structures that house nesting holes for domesticated pigeons.

The internal stuccoes and the hexagonal bathroom (a bizarre fashion of the time, documented in several Genoese villas, but preserved only in Villa delle Peschiere) were realized by Marcello Sparzo, a member of the school of Giovanni Battista Castello. The rich frescoes at the piano nobile, almost completely preserved, are attributed to Antonio Semino with some interventions by Luca Cambiaso, to whom is also attributed the mythological cycle of frescoes in the lateral rooms.

It was the meeting place for the conservative politicians of Puerto Rico, a place to discuss the politics related to the finance and government administration during the Spanish colonial period in Puerto Rico. Currently, the palace is a venue for important social activities. The neoclassical design of the facade makes use of ornamentation to differentiate the piano nobile (the principal floor) of the palace from the first floor. The second level is elegant and refined.

The reconstructed Palazzo between Palazzo Torlonia to the right and Palazzo Rusticucci-Accoramboni–also rebuilt–to the left The building that exists today along Via della Conciliazione has two floors with a rusticated portal surmounted by Peruzzi's balcony.Gigli (1992) p. 58 The building receives light from square windows at the ground floor, centred and rusticated windows on the piano nobile, and rectangular windows at the second floor. The roof is topped by a projecting cornice.

The interior chapel was refurbished with polychrome marble and frescoed by Vincenzo Meucci with depictions of Trinity in glory and angelic musicians. Meucci also frescoed the entry ceiling and courtyard gallery, and a ceiling in the piano nobile with the Fall of Phaeton. The fresco decoration also employed Anton Domenico Giarré. In 1788, the Marquis Roberto di Gino, who had inherited the palace, sold the palace to the brothers Zanobi and Marco Covoni Girolami.

Nicolson, p.237 The principal entrance is through the Marble Hall, which is in fact made of pink Derbyshire alabaster; this leads to the piano nobile, or the first floor, and state rooms. The most impressive of these rooms is the Saloon, which has walls lined with red velvet. Each of the major state rooms is symmetrical in its layout and design; in some rooms, false doors are necessary to fully achieve this balanced effect.

The main block also > features coupled Ionic columns and an ornamental parapet culminating in a > central sculptural cartouche. The side wings, which are lower than the main > block, are articulated with Tuscan pilasters and arched windows. The piano > nobile rests upon a rusticated brick base with a heavy water table. Its interior is now fairly plain, as courtroom ornamentation has been removed or hidden, and lowered ceilings have been installed in many areas.

Roma Segreta entry. The palace was linked to a palace once owned by the Cenci family with facade on the parallel Via del Teatro Valle, under the design of Onorio Lunghi. The frescoed lunettes in the piano nobile, depicting episodes and legends from Ancient Roman history, are by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli.Accurata, E Succinta Descrizione Topografica, E Istorica Di Roma, Volume 1, by Ridolfino Venturini, published by Carlo Barbellieni, Rome (1768); page 251-252.

Between 1681 and 1683, the courtyard and its surrounding loggias were further re-designed by the architect Giovanni Battista Foggini.Cresti, p.369. Between 1766-1783, the architect Gaspare Paoletti, during the third and final renovation of the villa, accomplished the definitive restructuring of the villa to twice its previous size. Paoletti added the two flanking inner courtyards to the central courtyard, and also designed the rear facade and the great ballroom on the piano nobile.

Coat of Arms of the Pisani family. On the piano nobile, the portego, or entrance hall spans from the Campo to the Rio del Santissimo, and once displayed portraits of the Pisani family. Of the original canvases, only the portraits of Andrea (died 1618) and Alvise (1618–1679) remain. An inventory in 1809 of the other rooms of the palace catalogued 159 paintings, including works by Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, and Palma il Vecchio.

Gate of Palazzo Baldassini, January 2011 Palazzo Baldassini is a palace in Rome, Italy, designed by the Renaissance architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger in about 1516–1519. It was designed for the papal jurist from Naples, Melchiorre Baldassini. The ground floor was used for shops or workshops, and the piano nobile consisted of private apartments. The interior was frescoed by Giovanni da Udine, Perin del Vaga, Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze.

On the east (main) elevation, the facade is divided into three pavilions by abstracted pilasters. The upper five floors rest on a two-story piano nobile crested by an ornamental string course. Carved eagles perch above the main entry doors at the north and south. The facade of the third through seventh floors is divided into ten bays of windows, with the first and tenth bays being above the north and south entries.

Palazzo della Consulta, Rome. Among his other major commissions in Rome was the Palazzo della Consulta (1732–1735), which, like the nearby Palazzo Quirinale, fronts the Piazza di Monte Cavallo. Fuga designed the two-storey façade with a piano nobile whose windows have low arched heads set in fielded panels, over a ground floor with low mezzanine. On the lower storey, the panels have channeled rustication and rusticated quoins at the corners.

In the mid-1800s, the piano nobile was frescoed with depictions of Night and the Apotheosis of the Poet by Francesco Scaramuzza. In the early twentieth century, the palace was acquired by Adriana Pigorini Lusignani, sister of a prominent archeologist, She left the building to the Commune of Parma, for use as a museum.Culture site Comune of Parma. The building was refurbished by Maurizio Bocchi, and is now used for exhibitions since 1996.

The main facade presents three orders of eight windows and a single sequence of nine balconies in the main floor (the "piano nobile"). Under the central balcony there is a high relief depicting an imposing marble eagle, work of Salvatore Valenti. Over the main facade's cornice, in central position, there is the statue of Saint Rosalia, work of Carlo D'Aprile (1661). Under the statue, it is located a big clock arrived from Paris in 1864.

Between 1752 and 1761 Bartolomeo Bolli constructed a new façade for the building, highly decorated in a late Baroque, or Rococò, manner. The entrance is flanked by two atlantes, supporting a contorted balcony.Guida artistica di Milano: dintorni e laghi, by Tito Vespasiano Paravicini (1881), page 114. In 1740, Carlo Giuseppe Merlo built the imposing and scenographic forked staircase (a scalone a tenaglia) whose sophisticated curves lead to the apartments of the piano nobile.

The level of ornateness varies according to the importance of the room. Rooms in the William Street wing have decorative cast-iron wall ventilators, marble fireplaces and plaster ceiling roses. The Cabinet room, positioned in the centre of this wing on the piano nobile, is distinguished by a more embellished plaster ceiling and elaborate carved cedar panels over the doorways. Ministers' suites, located in the corner pavilions, and rooms associated with the Cabinet overlook the street.

The façade of the principal block features columned and pedimented windows indicating the piano nobile, a defining feature of the Italianate style. The two storey ballroom block stretches south of the main block and the tower, and is entered through a large arcaded and columned porte-cochere. The ballroom is said to have been the largest in the British Empire. The interior of Government House is elaborately decorated in contrast to the chaste lines of the exterior.

Within this space is the present-day Barcelona City History Museum entrance, a well, and the main staircase which wraps around the patio to access the piano nobile. The court is surrounded by an arcade of Gothic arches at this level, with another gallery above this supporting the roof. Inside the building, rooms are adapted to its current function and used as exhibition spaces. Its original decoration was not preserved during the deconstruction, reconstruction, and relocation of the building.

This was born by ionic columns, and was adorned with the coats of arms of the Alicorni (a silver unicorn with a golden horn on a green field) sculptured on the small pilasters of the balustrade at the first floor ("piano nobile"), and on the corinthian pilasters at the second floor.Pernier (1928) p. 204 In its renovation of 1928 Adolfo Pernier restored all these elements, which have been retained also in the reconstruction along Borgo Santo Spirito.Gigli (1992) p.

The cour d'honneur was defined by terraces. The central block extends symmetrically into short wings, composed of several sections, each with its own roofline, with raked roofs and tall chimney stacks, in several ranges, with a broken façade reminiscent of the planning in work of Pierre Lescot and Philibert Delorme in the preceding century. The single pile construction typical of its epoch carries three storeys, a basement supporting a ground floor and piano nobile with three attic floors above.

Wings enclosed the court on either side; once again they had end pavilions with squared domes. On the façades of the piano nobile there were niches in the piers between windows, containing statues, and niches in the ground floor containing busts. The garden front looked onto a square parterre that was itself surrounded by moats and reached by a central bridge. Like the two outer courts, it was divided in four plats with a central feature.

Entrance to the mansion is by three segmented arches under the portico, or more formally, by climbing a double curved staircase behind the three arches. The stairs rise to an open loggia beneath the portico which gives access to the mansion's principal entrance. The fenestration is designed to indicate the status of their floor. Thus, small windows indicate the domestic ground floor and secondary upper floor, while the windows of the first floor piano nobile are tall and large.

The floor plan is reminiscent of French castles. It has a piano nobile with a banquet hall above the main entrance, with access to the balcony, a ground floor with lower ceilings, and a second floors for servants with even lower ones. This arrangement became characteristic of mansions and upper-class town houses in the entire 18th century. In the rear wing, above the arcade, there is a well-preserved domed Baroque room with a splendid stucco ceiling.

Construction of the mansion was begun in the 1630s on a piece of land owned by Jakob De la Gardie. De la Gardie tasked Hans Jacob Kristler with the construction. The five-floor building was built of brick and stone with a copper roof. The living quarters were situated in the ground floor, the festivities hall on the second (piano nobile), dancing and music rooms on the third, and stores and armoury on the fourth and fifth floors.

On the floor above (piano nobile) were the bedrooms, the kitchen and dining room, the leaving room in which the baron would receive his peasants and his friends and hold parties. In these occasions a modern horn-gramophone would entertain his guests. The walls and the ceiling were decorated with frescos depicting romantic scenes. A wooden staircase (ncsasciata) connected this floor with the attic where there was an oven and where the seasonal fruit was being preserved.

The villa seen from the garden in a photo by Paolo Monti, 1966 The Villa Lante is formed by two casini (houses), nearly identical but built by different owners in a period separated by 30 years. Each square building has a ground floor of rusticated arcades or loggias which support a piano nobile above. Each facade on this floor has just three windows, alternating round or pointed pediments. Each window is divided by pilasters in pairs.

Twin-lit, round-arched windows in the two upper stories are set within arches with highly pronounced voussoirs that spring from pilaster to pilaster. The facade is topped by a boldly projecting cornice. The ground floor was for business (the Rucellai family were powerful bankers) and was flanked by benches running along the street facade. The second story (the piano nobile) was the main formal reception floor and the third story the private family and sleeping quarters.

These wings became adapted in design to house the staff, and other secondary rooms. A second distinguishing feature of this new era was that flat lead roofs now often replaced the former attics where the servants had slept. However, this lack of space was compensated in the new houses by the entire ground floor being given over to the servants. This floor, usually built of rusticated stone, was beneath the larger and grander piano nobile occupied by the employers.

The plans for Holkham were of a large central block of two floors only, containing on the piano nobile level a series of symmetrically balanced state rooms situated around two courtyards. No hint of these courtyards is given externally; they are intended for lighting rather than recreation or architectural value. This great central block is flanked by four smaller, rectangular blocks, or wings,Jones, Nigel R. "Architecture of England, Scotland and Wales". Greenwood Press, 2005. 145.

On the ground floor, the rusticated walls are pierced by small windows more reminiscent of a prison than a grand house. One architectural commentator, Nigel Nicolson, has described the house as appearing as functional as a Prussian riding school.Nicolson, 234. The principal, or South façade, is 344 feet (104.9 m) in length (from each of the flanking wings to the other), its austerity relieved on the piano nobile level only by a great six-columned portico.

The fluted columns are thought to be replicas of those in the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, also in Rome. Around the hall are statues in niches; these are predominantly plaster copies of classical deities. The hall's flight of steps lead to the piano nobile and state rooms. The grandest, the Saloon, is situated immediately behind the great portico, with its walls lined with patterned red caffoy (a mixture of wool, linen and silk) and a coffered, gilded ceiling.

Refurbishment of the buildings at the site into a single palace was commissioned in 1750 by Giovanni Battista Mellori, with designs by Simone Cantoni. The elevated lateral wings with some atlantes at the corner cornices of the wings add some dynamism to the facade. The interior of the piano nobile was decorated with stucco and chiaroscuro frescoes. The central entrance portico has a balcony that rests on doric columns; the balcony has a protruding canopy with corinthian columns.

From 1874 to 1922, it housed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from 1924 to 1953 it housed the Ministry of Colonies. In 1955, it became the home of the Constitutional Court of Italy. Fuga ordered the two- storey facade with a piano nobile whose windows have low arched heads set in fielded panels, over a ground floor with low mezzanine. On the lower story the panels have channeled rustication and rusticated quoins at the corners.

At some point in the 19th century the design was altered, probably by John Pinch. The pediment was moved to be above the attic storey, so that the attics of the central houses were not deprived of light. Palmer's plan had a carved tympanum in the pediment, but this was never made, probably due to a lack of funds. Pinch also added balconies with wrought iron railings on the piano nobile (first floor) of all the houses.

Carlo Maderno designed the palaceHoward Hibbard, Carlo Maderno and Roman Architecture, 1580-1630, 1971. at the beginning of the 17th century for Asdrubale Mattei, Marquis di Giove and father of Girolamo Mattei and Luigi Mattei. He was also the brother of Ciriaco Mattei and Cardinal Girolamo Mattei. It was Maderno who was responsible for the extravagantly enriched cornice on the otherwise rather plain stuccoed public façade, the piano nobile loggia in the courtyard and the rooftop loggia or altana.

It has two floors and a mezzanine, with a typically Baroque façade featuring a rich sculpture decoration. The ground floor, surmounted by a parapet, has at the middle a big portal with a tympanum. The piano nobile has seven rectangular windows within a large set of decorations, including false columns, two large coat of arms and, above each window, a broken entablature. The mezzanine, separated by the floor below by a frame, has six small windows.

The interiors are frescoed by Angelo Michele Colonna and Giacomo Alboresi (Assumption of the Virgin, Family Chapel); Domenico Santi and Domenico Maria Canuti (Allegory of Aurora, Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, and Dusk in the piano nobile, 1664); and Death of Phaeton also by Alboresi and Colonna. The palace was sold to the Cardinal Pucci and then the Fibbia family (now also called Palazzo Felicini Fibbia or Felicini poi Fibbia). The palace underwent extensive restorations in 1905.

It has now moved to the piano nobile, and sheltered on 17th-century walnut shelves. The collection holds 226,000 books, including 60,000 rare books (among which are 380 incunabula and nearly 5,000 16th-century editions), 1,350 codices, 6,000 prints, ca. 2,400 periodicals (330 current serials), music scores, cd- roms, audiocassettes, and films. An 11th-century Evangelarium and an early 12th-century codex of Honorius Augustodunensis and a codex by Hugh of Saint Victor are examples of the Beneventan script.

The church of San Gottardo was also re-decorated in painting, stucco and gilding and upgraded to be a proper Royal-Ducal Chapel. Salone dei Festini and Salone di Audienzia (now Hall of Emperors), both on the "piano nobile" (noble floor), were also restored. The Cortile d'Onore wings housed the chancery, the magistrate and accounting offices and other administrative and financial offices. The Governor and the Privy Council met in new rooms built on the north side of the garden.

Castello Thiene The Palazzo Porto Colleoni Thiene, also called a Villa or Castello, is a prominent palace structure in the town center of Thiene. The castle has two lateral battlement or tower-like corners, with merlonated roof edges. It was completed by 1476 in the late-gothic style of land palaces in the Veneto, including the tall columns and ogival windows on the piano nobile. The initial architect was Domenico da Venezia, but the work was completed by Giovanni da Porta.

The first floor was designed to be a piano nobile (meaning literally a "noble floor"); as its name suggests, it contains the principal rooms of the house. During the 1770s, when Basildon was built, a domestic and architectural movement from formality towards informality was in progress. Thus, while the exterior of Basildon is pure symmetry, this symmetry is not reflected in the interior layout of the rooms as would have been the case just a few years earlier.Girouard, p212, explains this movement.

The palace was commissioned by the wealthy merchant and banking Costa family from Genoa. The architecture and the fresco decoration were designed in 1693 by Ferdinando Bibiena. Bibiena designed the palace's dramatic entry staircase, leading to a piano nobile which Bibiena painted quadratura and Giovanni Evangelista Draghi frescoed the Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne (1699). The palace now hosts the Museo Ambientale and collects artworks, furniture, and artifacts of mainly the 17th and 18th-century, including works by Salvator Rosa.

In the entrance is a large statue of Hercules by Giuseppe Maria Mazza. The Piano Nobile was designed only in the 18th century, and was frescoed by Carlo Lodi and Antonio Rossi. Some of the frescoes exalt the military prowess of Malvezzi men, including Emilio Malvezzi, who fought for King Sigismund II of Poland. The stucco work of Carlo Nessi link the heraldic symbols of the Malvezzi and Campeggi families, united in 1707 by the marriage of Matteo Malvezzi and Francesca Maria Campeggi.

Facade of Palazzo dei Convertendi along Piazza Scossacavalli, 1920 ca. Since that time, the palace occupied the whole west side of Piazza Scossacavalli, with six shops and two portals at its center. The left portal introduced into the small church of San Filippo Neri, erected in the 17th century by the Spinola and containing only one altar. The ground floor was surmounted by three floors, each with eight windows; those belonging to the piano nobile had centred and rusticated frames.

This is a Chinese-style saloon enhanced by Queen Mary, who, working with the designer Sir Charles Allom, created a more "binding"Harris, de Bellaigue & Miller, p. 93. Chinese theme in the late 1920s, although the lacquer doors were brought from Brighton in 1873. Running the length of the piano nobile of the east wing is the Great Gallery, modestly known as the Principal Corridor, which runs the length of the eastern side of the quadrangle.Harris, de Bellaigue & Miller, p. 91.

The first John Bibb structure was built in Victorian Free Classical style in temple form, resulting in a single large prismatic volume with two projecting wings with a cruciform plan symmetrical about two axes. The elevations have a high piano nobile (main floor) four pediments and carved foliated decoration. The 1909 alterations were designed by Harry Chambers Kent in Federation Free Classical style. The closure of Bethel Street and the creation of the Bethel Steps to replace it enabled a larger site.

The palace was frescoed by Antonio Vannetti, Sigismondo Betti, and Anton Domenico Giarré. The next owner, Anna Riccardi, born to the Strozzi family, created the gardens, and continued decoration of the piano nobile with a team of painters including Luigi Catani, Antonio Fedi, Gasparo Martellini, Angiolo Angiolini and Niccolò Contestabile. In 1860-1862, the palace was enlarged with interventions of the architects Felice Francolini and later Gaetano Baccani. They installed the coat of arms of the Riccardi-Strozzi, now in the interior courtyard.

251 Palladio would often model his villa elevations on Roman temple facades. The temple influence, often in a cruciform design, later became a trademark of his work. Palladian villas are usually built with three floors: a rusticated basement or ground floor, containing the service and minor rooms. Above this, the piano nobile accessed through a portico reached by a flight of external steps, containing the principal reception and bedrooms, and above it is a low mezzanine floor with secondary bedrooms and accommodation.

It is the residence of David Cholmondeley, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley. It was commissioned by the de facto first British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, in 1722, and it is a key building in the history of Palladian architecture in England. It is a Grade I listed building surrounded by of parkland a few miles from Sandringham House. The house has a rectangular main block which consists of a rustic basement at ground level, with a piano nobile, bedroom floor and attics above.

The south or garden front of Stowe from Jones' Views of the Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen (1829). Apart from an increase in the size of some of the basement windows (which in this context means ground level, as the first floor is a piano nobile) the facade is unchanged today. All of the top floor windows in the earlier version of this front were sacrificed for the sake of architectural effect. The remaining top floor rooms all face sideways.

The original building was a three storeyed masonry structure with a sandstone facade. The facade is designed using classical elements, with a rusticated base and double-height columns rising from the piano nobile to support an entablature. The centre of the facade is marked by an aedicular containing an arched doorway, at ground level (the original entrance, now blocked in) and a small pediment above in the entablature. The large unfluted columns with lotus leaf capitals form a colonnade in front of the second and third storeys.

The most extensive change was probably the demolition of the Eggenberger palace theater, in the place of which a baroque palace church was established. The supervisor of these works was the Grazer court architect Joseph Hueber, a student of Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt. The third phase of the changes came during the 19th century and was limited to the living quarters on the 1st storey (2nd floor in American English) of the palace. The piano nobile remained untouched and unused for a full century.

Tsaritsa Alexandra's new garden. The door at the centre is the Saltykov Entrance. The Private Apartments of the Winter Palace are sited on the piano nobile of the western wing of the former imperial palace, the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Access to the private rooms, for members of the Imperial Family, from the exterior was usually through the Saltykov Entrance (centre in the photograph to the right) which was reserved for use by only the Tsar, Tsaritsa and grand dukes and grand duchesses.

Palazzo Muti. Stairs leading from the courtyard to the piano nobile. The Muti Papazzurri complex of residences was rented in its entirety at the expense of the Apostolic Camera from the Marchese Giovanni Battista Muti and his widowed mother the Marchesa Alessandra Millini Muti in 1719 for James Stuart (the "Old Pretender"), and Maria Klementyna Sobieska as their Roman residence. The Popes Clement XI and Innocent XIII considered the couple to be the rightful and, more importantly, Catholic King and Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland.

The five-story Rizzoli Building, designed by Albert S. Gottlieb, carried the address of 712 Fifth Avenue before the present skyscraper was built. Designed in the French classical style, the structure is about deep and is five stories tall with a limestone-and-brick facade. The facade is three bays wide, and at ground level, had a door in the rightmost bay. On the upper stories, the Rizzoli Building had a piano nobile with three full-height, arched windows, as well as balusters underneath each opening.

Its facade consists of a rusticated lower floor below the piano nobile portico, a loggia with a three-quarter eight-columned Corinthian colonnade supporting a triangular pediment with armour decorations by Stepan Pimenov and Vasily Demut-Malinovsky. The entrance staircase is flanked by two Medici lions, specially cast for the palace in 1824. The arches and windows of the first floor are decorated with stone lion heads. The facade facing the Mikhailovsky Garden consists of a large loggia-colonnade, while Corinthian colonnades decorate the building's wings.

This more than 3-meter-wide stairway extends up to the top floor without any central supports. At its foot are two 3rd-century sarcophagi. The first piano nobile (first upper floor) features chandeliers made from Murano glass, marble flooring and doorways and silk tapestries on the wall. The public rooms also house numerous works of art, from statues, European paintings (16th-19th centuries) as well as Oriental pieces such as Chinese lions (Han and Wei dynasties), Cambodian Buddha heads and Indian and Persian artifacts.

In 1752, the main entrance and stairwell was refurbished under the designs of Gaspare Paoletti (1727-1813). In 1798, the family had bought the adjacent palace at #40, and at the turn of the 19th century, Giuseppe Poggi, remodeled it to resemble the other facade. This refurbishment damaged many of the frescoes on the piano nobile. Until 1825, the palace held a highly prestigious collections of paintings, including works by or attributed to Piero di Cosimo, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Andrea del Sarto, Carlo Dolci, and Rembrandt.

Construction of the palace began in 1545, but completion of the structure is attributed to Bernardino Brugnoli, (1538–1585), nephew of Michele Sammicheli. Over the next centuries further reconstruction Commissioned by the Da Lisca family added a Piano Nobile. The palace was severely damaged during the war on February 23, 1945, although the central salon, frescoed by Domenico Riccio (il Brusasorzi) was spared. The palace is now owned by the Province of Verona, which in 1952 granted it to the Liceo Scientifico Statale “Angelo Messedaglia”.

The revival of classical antiquity can best be illustrated by the Palazzo Rucellai. Here the pilasters follow the superposition of classical orders, with Doric capitals on the ground floor, Ionic capitals on the piano nobile and Corinthian capitals on the uppermost floor. Soon, Renaissance architects favored grand, large domes over tall and imposing spires, doing away with the Gothic style of the predating ages. In Mantua, Alberti ushered in the new antique style, though his culminating work, Sant'Andrea, was not begun until 1472, after the architect's death.

Many of these books were housed in specially commissioned cabinets designed by William Kent. Today the Library is devoid of books, the collections having been removed to Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, or in the Royal Institute of British Architects collections, which can be consulted at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Twelve steps leading from the octagonal section of the Library descend to an octagonal brick cellar vaulted in Early English style. From this cellar wine and beer were raised by dumb waiter to guests on the piano nobile.

The narrow ancient streets of the medieval centre are still preserved, as well as the castello, once a possession of the Benedictine Order; it dates from the 11th century. The castle is built at the end of a spur, overlooking Arsoli on one side and extending formal gardens on the other. four frescoed rooms on the piano nobile are flanked by guardrooms hung with arms and armor and family portraits. This rocca has been in his possession since it was purchased by Fabrizio Massimo in 1574.

Around 1655, the Ducal Chapel was frescoed by Giovanni Battista Carlone and Domenico Fiasella. In 1777, it was subject to a fire, and was subsequently rebuilt in Neoclassicist style by Simone Cantoni. On the main floor, the so-called Piano Nobile, are the frescoed halls of the Maggior and Minor Consiglio, where many public events take place. The Palace of the Doges was restored in 1992, in occasion of the celebrations of Christopher Columbus and the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Americas.

The current house was remodelled in 1783-1785 in Palladian style by John Soane, who also added stables and lodge. It is, however, possible that the quite conservative interior remodelling work was done by Norwich builder and sculptor John de Carle (1750-1828) and Lord Camelford to Soane's designs: de Carle supplied at least one of the fireplaces. It has been considered a smaller version of Holkham Hall nearby. Soane also added a split cantilevered staircase, and the piano nobile on the first floor.

Original features include plaster mouldings, bolection moulded fireplaces, and rococo wood carvings. The cantilevered Imperial staircase, added by Soane, has stone treads and a cast iron baluster, leads to the piano nobile on the first floor, decorated with carved wooden fittings and moulded plaster cornices. It has 13 bedrooms, with six main bedrooms, seven bathrooms and two dressing rooms on the first floor, and seven more bedrooms and five bathrooms on the second floor. The 18th-century Italian wall-paintings were removed from the salon c. 1949.

The architect was Manfredo Manfredi, who was instructed to design a fitting structure for a government headquarters. The Viminale was officially inaugurated on 9 July 1925. The building has five stories and hundreds of rooms linked by a series of hallways. Notable aspects include the imposing triple arched entrance of the Palazzo della Presidenza, the staircase of honour of the Palazzo degli Uffici, the chamber of the Council of Ministers, and entrance to the stairway leading to the piano nobile, with wooden, marble, and stucco decoration.

In order to show his contempt of money, he was said to have all the silver dishes thrown into the river after the end of the parties; however, his servants were secretly ready to recollect them with nets draped under the windows. The villa called the Viridario in Chigi's time served as banking facility as well as residence, setting Chigi apart from the ordinary run of bankers in Rome, who normally resided in a piano nobile directly above but unconnected to their street-level botteghe.

The gardens of the villa are as impressive as the building itself, a significant example of the Italian Renaissance garden period. The villa's fortress theme is carried through by a surrounding moat and three drawbridges. Two facades of the pentagonal arrangement face the two gardens cut into the hill; each garden is accessed across the moat by a drawbridge from the apartments on the piano nobile and each is a parterre garden of box topiary with fountains. A grotto- like theatre was once here.

The ground floor pilasters continue but unrusticated, the cornice they support is entirely in accordance with Roman contemporary design, as are the windows. The windows on the piano nobile have straight, but broken, pediments with canted sides, a theme commonly reproduced by Vaccarini in ensuing years. The free-standing columns supporting a straight balcony endow a pompous grandeur to the entrance. The balcony was to become a feature of Sicilian Baroque; it was later to take many shapes, often curved, serpentine, or a combination of both juxtaposing.

Designed by Alfred Chapman, the Beaux Arts building features a grand entrance fronting College Street by St. George Street, with stairs rising to the former library's piano nobile. A second, less prominent ground level entrance, located towards the western part of the College Street façade, balances the composition. This main façade fronting College Street is characterized by a sequence of lower paired windows set in a smooth grey stone wall. Its contrasting yellow brick upper section features six two-storey windows set between Corinthian columns.

The palace, under the Martinengo underwent major reconstruction after the mid-19th-century. In the 20th century, the palace served many functions including the offices of the Fascist Party (Casa del Fascio) and other ministries. The 18th-century frescoes in the palace by Franchi depict the Allegory of Victory, Triumph of Merit, and Allegory of Abundance in the piano nobile and in the floor above, Allegory of Peace.Ministerio dei beni e delle attivita' culturali e del turismo, Direzione regionale per i beni culturali e paesaggistici del Veneto.

Pistoia e il suo territorio: Pescia e i suoi dintorni: guida del forestiero, by Giuseppe Tigri, Tipografia Cino, Pistoia (1853): pages 180-182. The palace is privately owned but notable for a chapel in the Piano Nobile, frescoed circa 1633 by Giovanni da San Giovanni. The work was patronized by Camillo Rospigliosi, in memory of his mother, Caterina. The frescoes are said to include contemporary portraits of the family, in the depictions of the Life of St Catherine, including an altarpiece depicting her Mystical Marriage.

In 1295, while Giano della Bella was potestà of Pistoia, it was decided to build a residence for the magistrates or elders of the city. Previously they had been housed in a palace at via di Sracceria. In the present spot near the Pistoia Cathedral, land and houses were purchased from a number of families: Bellanti, Lazzari, Cremonesi, and othersTolomei mentions Sinibuldi and Taviani.. By 1345, the three ground floor arches were erected, and the great hall in the main floor (piano nobile) was being built. Construction was completed in 1353 with mullioned windows.

William Street facade completed in the first stage, 2014The view of the William Street facade from the river, although interrupted by South-East Freeway, is enhanced by the elevated position of the site. The building consists of a partly sunken basement and an elevated ground floor or piano nobile above which are two additional floors. It is built to the property alignment around a large central courtyard. The design is consistent with English practice of the late nineteenth century in employing a classical style drawn from sixteenth century Italian architecture.

The 52 windows of the piano nobile with the 8 windows of the Planetary Room make a total of 60, representing both the number of seconds in a minute and the minutes in an hour. The palace is erected on a rectangular plan with the geometrical center being formed by the middle tower with its Gothic chapel. On each corner there is a tower-like rise. Each of these corner-towers represents one of the four seasons and the outside corner of each is aimed exactly in a cardinal direction.

The palace is characterized by Renaissance forms inspired by Lombard and Ferrara architecture. On the ground floor there is a high portico with nine round arches (five on the side of the square and four on the southern facade). The two exposed brick facades of the main floor are each decorated with three and a half biforas and are decorated with terracotta tiles with Renaissance floral motifs due facciate in mattone a vista del piano nobile sono decorate ognuna da trei. The top floor is characterized by 13 small monoforas, also decorated with terracotta ornaments.

Like the Colosseum, the three façades have a different order of architecture on each floor: Doric on the ground level, then Ionic on the piano nobile and finishing with Corinthian on the upper floor, the style of the building thus becoming progressively more ornate as it rises. Gay Street links Queen Square to The Circus. It was designed by John Wood, the Elder in 1735 and completed by his son John Wood, the Younger. The houses are of 3 storeys with Mansard roofs, with many also having Ionic columns.

The Château de Sully, situated between Autun and Beaune (Saône-et-Loire), is the largest of the Renaissance châteaux of southern Burgundy. Paired outbuildings of a more vernacular character face each other across a grassed forecourt, while to the rear is the vegetable garden, fenced by fruit trees. The château is approached by an axial stone bridge across its moat. The façades express the traditionally defensive character of the rez-de-chaussée, the ground floor, and the richer, more open aspect of the piano nobile, articulated by pilasters.

Freehill Tower foyer Built entirely in sandstone, the college is 14th century English Gothic in style, and substantially Renaissance Baroque in plan, in the manner of Wardell's earlier monasteries and convents. The principal floor or piano nobile is above the ground floor and is related to a central space (the ante-chapel) by a series of classical enfilades. The arrangement of the ground floor entry vestibule, and the formal, axially linked Imperial staircase are equally classical in inspiration. In this respect St John's is unlike the traditional layout of an English university college.

The Cathedral of the Not-Made-by-Hand Image of Our Saviour in the Winter Palace, by Eduard Hau (1866). The Grand Church of the Winter Palace () in Saint Petersburg, sometimes referred to as the Winter Palace's cathedral, was consecrated in 1763. It is located on the piano nobile in the eastern wing of the Winter Palace, and is the larger, and principal, of two churches within the Palace. A smaller, more private church was constructed in 1768, near the private apartment in the northwest part of the wing.

The museum has one wing on the piano nobile displaying works from the 19th century, many by Diotti himself, and maintaining the rooms as they would have looked when he lived, taught, and painted there. The display includes works by Marcantonio Ghislina, Francesco Antonio Chiozzi, Paolo Araldi, Paolo Troubetzkoy, Tommaso Aroldi, Gaetano Previati, and Amedeo Bocchi. In the north side of the building are displayed works by mainly local artists of the 20th century, including Mario Beltrami, Gianfranco Manara, Tino Aroldi, and Goliardo Padova. Cultural Goods of Lombardy website.

George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. London. . demonstrates that his architect, Knobelsdorff, was more a draughtsman at Sanssouci than complete architect. Frederick appears to have accepted no suggestions for alteration to his plans, refusing Knobelsdorff's idea that the palace should have a semi-basement storey, which would not only have provided service areas closer at hand, but would have put the principal rooms on a raised piano nobile. This would have given the palace not only a more commanding presence, but also would have prevented the problems of dampness to which it has always been prone.

On Number 6 is the Postmuseum, a postal museum which boasts unique historic postal and philatelic collections. The entire block constituted the only post office in the capital from its inauguration in 1720 until the opening of the museum in 1906. The present façade, designed by Fredrik Blom in 1820–1825, is centred on the four green Ekeberg marble columns standing on the pavement, the doric capitals supporting a balcony decorated with sphinxes. While the windows of the piano nobile support pediments with corbels, the upper part of the composition is gradually simplified.

One of his masterworks in palace construction is the façade (1718–21) of the Palazzo Madama in central Turin. It recalls the formality of Palladio’s Palazzo Chiericati but with the enhancement of detail and windows. While the facade appears to house an airy piano nobile, it in fact is merely a scenic, almost theatrical gesture, sheltering a grandiose entry stairway entrance to a medieval castle. But this work was also part of an ambitious program to recast the crowded, medieval layout of central Turin into a more open and planned set of connected plazas.

A heavy cornice and parapet caps the façade, with allegorical statues standing by its corners. The most distinctive part of the façade is the central concave pavilion, which creates the semi-circular main balcony and pulls together the entire mass, finally crowned by an austere dome upon an octagonal drum. The piano nobile is reached by two staircases from the ground floor foyer. The first space, the art deco rotunda below the cupola, opens to the south the main balcony that faces Osmeña Boulevard, and to its north the ballroom (social hall).

The Hunting Lodge of Duke Charles II of Parma, also listed in Italian as either Casino di Caccia di Carlo Ludovico Borbone, or Villa Bellosguardo in reference to later owners, is a rural villa in the hamlet of Pieve Santo Stefano in the province of Lucca, Tuscany, Italy. The main villa was designed circa 1838 by Lorenzo Nottolini for Charles II, Duke of Parma. The piano nobile, with a Rococo roofline leads from a balcony via two curved external staircases to a garden belvedere. It is presently used for lodging and cultural functions.

The most extravagant ornaments were those made from solid silver at the Gobelins, to the cost of some 10 million livres. There were 167 such objects on display between the Hall of Mirrors and the Grand Apartment in 1687, ranging from candelabras, gueridons and statues, to urns, stools, and incense burners.Walton, 1986; p.125 For the new appartement du roi, Louis chose the set of eight rooms on the piano nobile behind the west façade of the Cour de Marbre which had once belonged to his father in the old chateau.

The first floor facade is dominated by two semi-circular tiled panels on which are depicted scenes of the Spanish Armada; that on the left depicts the "Spanish Armada Leaving Ferrol" while that on the right depicts the "Defeat of the Spanish Armada". Above each panel is a pair of circular oculi windows. The central section has three round-arched transom windows flanked by Ionic half columns. Above the central section is a tall "piano nobile" section with three pairs of arched windows, with each pair flanked by columns similar to those below.

Marrickville Post Office is at 274A Marrickville Road, Marrickville, on the corner of Silver Street, comprising the whole of Lot 1 Section 2 DP1943 and Lot 1 DP780055. The site is on a flat and gently tapering. The building frontage to Marrickville Road is two-storied with loosely Renaissance articulation: pilasters on each side of a central doorway on the ground floor, two arched windows either side, and a reproduction of this pattern in the five first floor windows. The first floor was treated as an astylar piano nobile/attic.

A cross section through the hall and saloon The neoclassical interior of the house was designed by Adam to be no less impressive than the exterior. Entering the house through the great north portico on the piano nobile, one is confronted by the marble hall designed to suggest the open courtyard or atrium of a Roman villa. Marble Hall 1763, decoration completed in 1776-7 Twenty fluted alabaster columns with Corinthian capitals support the heavily decorated, high-coved cornice. Niches in the walls contain classical statuary; above the niches are grisaille panels.

The transformation was largely external - the old house was literally wrapped in Roman cement, a very hard render made from ground flint. This is when the podium visible today was built. What had been ground floor rooms became basement rooms and the main reception rooms which had been on the piano nobile were now at the same level as the podium. The windows of servants’ rooms on the uppermost storey were covered by the entablature of the temple facade, and is partly why it was necessary to extend the house.

There is a long rectangular axis that runs across the estate in a north-south direction. The agricultural crop fields and tree groves were laid out and arranged along the long axis, as was the villa itself. The outer appearance of the Villa Emo is marked by a simple treatment of the entire body of the building, whose structure is determined by a geometrical rhythm. The construction consists of brick-work with a plaster finish, visible wooden beams seen in the spaces of the piano nobile, and coffered ceilings like that within the loggia.

Two of the surviving gate piers Coleshill House was double-pile building, influenced by Jones's Queens House in Greenwich, and combining Italian, French, Dutch and English architectural ideas. It measured approximately , with two main floors of nine bays, above a rusticated basement, and an attic with seven prominent dormer windows and four tall chimneystacks on each side of the hipped roof. The roof was topped by a flat deck surrounded by a balustrade with a central belvedere cupola. The main floors had equal proportions for storeys, unlike the Palladian emphasis on the piano nobile.

Water frontage on the Neva was highly prized by the Russian aristocracy, while Millionnaya Street was considered one of the Russian Empire's grandest addresses. The façade is a remarkable example of Palladian architecture in Russia. This style, imported by foreign architects, especially during the reign of Empress Catherine II, had become very fashionable with Russian nobility by the 1780s when the mansion was built. The façade is shaped with great simplicity, combining harmonic proportions and moderate ornamentation that highlight few decorative elements, such as the piano nobile balcony facing the Neva and the palace's pediments.

The corners of the irregular building are accentuated by quoining, while shallow pilasters divide the five bays from the first floor upwards. Externally, the ground floor shows banded rustication (very similar to that found in the Roman Palazzo Vidoni Caffarelli, built in 1515 and attributed to Raphael), while the floors above are of rendered ochre ashlar. In the custom of the time, the ground floor was designed for occupation by only horses, servants and domestic offices. Here on the first floor, the piano nobile, were the principal rooms.

He had the various buildings rearranged into a unified structure; on the piano nobile, he arranged four monumental rooms dedicated to the celebration of his great-uncle and of his family, as well as a Gallery for displaying the works of art in his collection, including Michelangelo's Battle of the Centaurs and Madonna of the Stairs. Michelangelo the Younger commissioned a number of contemporary Italian artists to decorate the interior rooms, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Cecco Bravo, Pietro da Cortona, Jacopo da Empoli, Francesco Furini, Giovanni da San Giovanni, Domenico Passignano, Ottavio Vannini and Jacopo Vignali.

Wingerworth Hall photographed six years before its demolition in 1927 Wingerworth Hall, demolished 1927, was the ancestral home of the Hunloke family in the village of Wingerworth, Derbyshire, England. It was built on an elevated site and completed in 1724 by an unknown architect. The house was in the rare style of understated Baroque peculiar to England. The rectangular building was on three floors raised above a semi-basement, thus causing to the principal rooms to be on a piano nobile reached from a broad straight external staircase.

The Palace was first erected at the site of a few earlier tower-houses bought in 1616 by the Lucchese merchant of silk Ascanio Mansi and his descendants. While the facade retains earlier Renaissance window features, between 1686 and 1691, Ascanio's son Raffaello employed the architect Raffaello Mazzanti to further renovate the now palace, and the piano nobile rooms acquired the present decoration and a grand staircase access. The cooler ground floor rooms were turned into a summer apartment. In the second half of the 18th century, Luigi Mansi pursued further refurbishing.

Above this solid and severe facade that Lawson chose instead of the customary two or three floors, the massive blocks of stone support just one floor. This upper floor is not an obvious piano nobile, but appears, though of more delicate and simple design, to be of equal value to the floor below. The rusticated pilasters of the lower floor are continued above, but become smooth dressed stone to match the upper facade. The pilasters' capitals are Corinthian, and as at the Bank of New South Wales they support an undecorated entablature.

Un-scaled plan of the piano nobile of Blenheim Palace. The state apartments are the two sets of rooms either side of the principal dining room (Saloon) marked "B". The master and mistress (here the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough) lived their everyday lives in the similarly arranged but smaller suites either side of the smaller dining room marked "O" A state room in a large European mansion is usually one of a suite of very grand rooms which were designed to impress. The term was most widely used in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Many of the most important rooms within Chiswick Villa were situated on the piano nobile (Upper Floor) and comprise eight rooms and a link building. The rooms on this level were either of the Composite or Corinthian order of architecture to illustrate their important status. In contrast, the Villa's ground-floor level was always intended to be plain and unadorned; it has low ceilings and little carving or gilding. Its rooms were for business, and Lord Burlington followed Palladio's recommendation to restrict the lowest order of Roman architecture, the Tuscan, to the ground floor.

On the garden side of the courtyard Amannati constructed a grotto, called the "grotto of Moses" on account of the porphyry statue that inhabits it. On the terrace above it, level with the piano nobile windows, Ammanati constructed a fountain centered on the axis; it was later replaced by the Fontana del Carciofo ("Fountain of the Artichoke"), designed by Giambologna's former assistant, Francesco Susini, and completed in 1641.Dynes p. 69 In 1616, a competition was held to design extensions to the principal urban façade by three bays at either end.

The roof, part of the attic and most of the main hall at the piano nobile were destroyed. The façade however remained intact, and today represents a rare example of a façade surviving with its original plaster and marmorino. In 1960, the ruined palace was sold by the Valmarana family to Vittor Luigi Braga Rosa, who led an extended restoration, rebuilding the parts demolished by war. He also enriched the palace with many decorations and artworks, coming from other destroyed palaces, in particular a collection of Seicento paintings by Giulio Carpioni with mythological themes.

The piano nobile contains the grandest and most formal rooms; these include six bedrooms and the principle reception room, the Grand salon, which is believed to be northern Småland's largest room in a private house (about 100 m²). Adjoining the Grand Salon is a chapel designed in the Gothic revival style; this is one of the earliest examples of Gothic revival in Sweden, and was inspired by the Gothic Room at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. The chapel is decorated with trompe-l'œil, and has not been altered since its completion in 1829.Official website.

The church was designed as a private house, for a local lawyer, John Jordan.Pevsner, p509. The building is on three floors, a high and clearly visible semi-basement, which would have contained the kitchens and domestic secondary rooms; the first floor which was thee principal floor containing the main reception rooms and entrance and the 2nd floor containing principal bedrooms. Given the date of the house, it's possible that the principal bedroom was on the first floor in the piano nobile style, but no documentary evidence survives describing the original layout.

The office building section contains three bays; on the piano nobile level, there are two narrow rectangular windows in between the two northernmost bays. The windows on the third through sixth floors do not correspond to the bays below, and there are seven windows on each floor. The northern part of the facade consists of a windowless blank wall with an emergency staircase from the theater affixed to it. Seen from the west, September 2019 The western and northern facades, both of which originally faced neighboring structures, contain a simple design.

The Jonesboro U.S. Post Office and Courthouse is a former federal building located at 524 South Church Street, in downtown Jonesboro, Arkansas. It is a three-story masonry structure, built out of brick and limestone. The ground floor is visually presented as a basement level clad in red brick, while the upper levels are finished in stucco with brick trim. Although the building lacks rounded-arch openings normally found in the Renaissance Revival, it is laid out along lines typical of that style, with the courtrooms on the second floor in the piano nobile style.

In 1913 the palace was acquired and refurbished by the Banca di Firenze, who commissioned the architects Ezio Cerpi and Adolfo Coppedè (1913–1915). They roofed the courtyard and added ceramic and stain- glass decorations by Chino and Galileo Chini. In 1931, it was acquired by the Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale. Mullioned windows and lunette reliefs The rusticated stone bricks made of yellow-ochre sandstone pietra forte on the ground floor give way to pale stucco walls on the second floor (Piano Nobile) with finely decorated mullioned windows with rounded arches.

La Parisienne also known as the Minoan Lady, is part of the Camp Stool Fresco, which was probably painted on the wall of the Sanctuary Hall on the Piano Nobile at the palace of Knossos. The sacral knot worn at the back of the neck seems to indicate that she is a priestess or even a goddess. The archaeological research in Minoan palaces, cemeteries and settlements has brought to light a multitude of objects related to beautification. Edmond Pottier gave her the name as he felt she resembled a contemporary woman from Paris.

Flanking the hall, two sets of stairs lead to the piano nobile, a large squared staircase by Bernini to the left and a smaller oval staircase by Borromini to the right. The famous helicoidal staircase by Borromini. As well as Borromini's false-perspective windows reveals, other influential aspects of Palazzo Barberini that were repeated throughout Europe include the unit of a central two-storey hall backed by an oval salone and the symmetrical wings that extended forward from the main block to create a cour d'honneur. The garden is known as a giardino segreto ("secret garden"), for its concealment from an outsider's view.

The ground floor is rusticated but the blocks of ashlar are imitation, as is the quoining on the floors above. The upper floor, which would have been the banks administrative offices, suggests a piano nobile, with tall sash windows crowned by segmental pediments. The Bank standing on the junction of Market Square and Kingsbury Square has a canted facade in order to suit the triangular junction cause by the meeting of the two squares and a common street. The building in style is very reminiscent of those buildings of Thomas Cubitt and Edward Blore in London at this period.

This has porticoes on each side, with graffiti decorations dating to the 1450s and octagonal capitals in a still late medieval style. The porticoes are cross- vaulted. The entrance on Via de' Bardi has fresco, attributed to Lorenzo di Bicci himself, with two flying figures holding the Uzzano coat of arms. Internally, at the feet of the main staircase, is a porphyry lion, an ancient Roman sculpture from the 2nd century AD. In the piano nobile is a small chapel with an altarpiece by Pontormo, perhaps taken from the Barbadori Chapel of the church of Santa Trinita.

The Countess is responsible for the staircase, the external chimneys, the majolica stoves, and the fine carvings (vaguely reminiscent of the Scuola di San Rocco) in the dining room on the second piano nobile, looking down to the garden, as well as a great deal of stabilization and replacement of marble on the facade.Venice, Martin Garrett, Signal Books, 2001, pg. 118 , “Venice rediscovered”, John Pemble, Clarendon Press, 1995, pg. 32 , In 1908 the painter Claude Monet created impressionist depictions of Palazzo Dario, including canvases at the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Museum of Art of Wales.

The two brothers administered considerable assets, including - as well as the Baldocci and Spinelli family estates - those of the Dell'Antella family, owners of the precious Vasari Archives. These were held in a room next to the library on the piano nobile of the villa. When the Spinelli line died out in 1882 the villa passed to Cesare Rasponi Bonanzi (1822–86), son of Spinella Amata Spinelli and count Gabriello Rasponi Bonanzi of Ravenna. Cesare married his cousin Letizia Rasponi Murat, grand-daughter of Napoleon, whose collection of memorabilia was displayed in a room dedicated to the French emperor.

The palace was designed by Giovanni Pietro Perti and decorated with frescos by Michelangelo Palloni. The piano nobile has initially displayed Dutch tiles and mosaics representing blazons, churches, castles, and palaces owned or built by the Sapiehas. Originally, the palace had multi-floor arcades on its sides, which were later built up to gain more space inside the building. Jan Kazimierz Sapieha the Younger by building the luxurious Sapieha Palace ensemble wished to surpass the John III Sobieski projects and to show his power and ability to be a Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland.

Also on the upper level, in front of the vestibule leading to the house, three doors open onto the grand foyer, with three bay windows opening the view out on place Neuve. The grand foyer with, on the right hand side, the little foyer and, on the left hand side, the little salon, are the piano nobile of the main façade. The enfilade effect of the three spaces in the grand foyer is magnified by the subtle visual interplay of reflections from several oversized mirrors. The grandeur of the foyer recalls the Louvre's famous Galerie d’Apollon in Paris.

This is an aspect that I find constantly in the work of this artist, who in 1994 was the first Italian to exhibit in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Here the views formed a complementary backdrop to the works on show, and this became a constant feature of all his urban projects. The Mountain of Salt dates from 1990. Originally created in Gibellina, it “appeared” in the Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples in 1995 and later, in 2011, in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, when the city dedicated a major retrospective to him on the piano nobile of the Palazzo Reale.

Externally these latter pavilions would have differed from their northern counterparts by large glazed Serlian windows on the piano nobile of their southern facades. Here the blocks were to appear as of two floors only; a mezzanine was to have been disguised in the north of the music room block. The linking galleries here were also to contain larger windows, than on the north, and niches containing classical statuary. The north front, approximately 107 metres in length, is Palladian in character, dominated by a massive, six-columned Corinthian portico; however, the south front (illustrated right) is pure neoclassical Robert Adam.

The second through fourth stories contain engaged columns in the Corinthian style; some of these columns are paired while the others are single. There are 44 columns in total: twelve each on the north, east, and west elevations, and eight on the south elevation. The second story is the piano nobile; the windows on this story are flanked by brackets and capped by enclosed pediments, with carved heads above them (see ). The third- and fourth-story windows, conversely, are less ornately decorated; this was normal for Beaux-Arts buildings, which generally had greater detailing on the more visible lower levels.

Ludwigslust: the entrance front facing the Platz The interiors of Ludwigslust are more fully neoclassical. The grand reception rooms are on the piano nobile, or Festetage ("Reception floor"), above a low ground floor that contained guestrooms. The Goldener Saal ("Gilded Hall") in the central block rises through two storeys, with a colossal order of Corinthian columns and massive decorations carried out in stucco and the innovative moldable and modelable paper-maché called Ludwigsluster Carton; it is used today for summertime concerts. One flanking range was semi-public, with a sequence of antechamber, salon and audience chamber, and a gallery.

The rooms on the piano nobile (the first floor) have frescoes and friezes by artists such as Giacinto Gimignani, Gaspard Dughet, Andrea Camassei, Giacinto Brandi, Francesco Allegrini, and Pier Francesco Mola. Carlo Rainaldi, the son of Girolamo, completed the building around 1650. The new palazzo became the home of Innocent's widowed and unpopular sister-in-law Olimpia Maidalchini, who was his confidante and advisor and, more scurrilously, reputed to be his mistress. She was the mother of Camillo Pamphilj, the one time cardinal, who through his marriage came into the possession of the Palazzo Aldobrandini, now known as the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj.

Richard Wagner in 1871 The composer Richard Wagner stayed in Venice six times between 1858 and his death. He arrived in Italy on his final trip not long after performances of his opera Parsifal premiered at the second Bayreuth Festival. He rented the entire piano nobile (mezzanine) level of the Ca' Vendramin Calergi from Count de' Bardi before his departure and arrived on 16 September 1882 with his wife Cosima Liszt, four children (Daniela von Bülow, Isolde, Eva and Siegfried Wagner) and household servants. Wagner died of a heart attack in the palace on the afternoon of 13 February 1883 at age 69.

Mannerism's most famous fresco: Giulio Romano's illusionism invents a dome overhead and dissolves the room's architecture in the Fall of the Giants. Like the Villa Farnesina in Rome, the suburban location allowed for a mixing of both palace and villa architecture. The four exterior façades have flat pilasters against rusticated walls, the fenestration indicating that the piano nobile is the ground floor, with a secondary floor above. The East façade differs from the other three by having Palladian motifs on its pilaster and an open loggia at its centre rather than an arch to the courtyard.

As in most Renaissance palazzi, the upper floors are reached by a broad stone staircase rising from the cloisterlike inner courtyard, this negated the need for the upper floor's noble occupants to ever visit the menial ground floor rooms. The piano nobile contains an enfilade of principal reception rooms; the importance of these rooms is denoted on the exterior by the large size of the windows and their alternating segmental and pointed pediments. View by Giuseppe Vasi of the Piazza Nicosia in 1748. The obtuse corner of the building (‘’pictured below’’), with its fountain, is to the left.

Vigna Contarena Villa in the 1930s Villa Contarini, also known as Vigna Contarena, is a villa in Este, Province of Padua, in the Veneto region of northern Italy. The name Vigna Contarena (vigna meaning « vineyard ») seems to come from the fruit trees and vines originally cultivated in the park of the villa, situated at the foot of the Euganean Hills. The villa was built in the first years of the 17th century and served both residential and agricultural purposes, with the ground floor destined for storage and labor uses, while the first floor, or piano nobile, contained the living quarters and formal rooms.

His design consisted of a rectangular building in three storeys, with a projecting portico on the south front, and two pavilions on each side, which were set back and approached by curved corridors. On each side of the portico was a curved stairway leading to the main middle floor, the piano nobile. As the house was originally planned, it had a central staircase, with three rooms on the south front. The middle of these rooms was the entrance hall, to the west of it was the drawing room, and to the east was the dining room.

The portal leads to an austere vaulted undercroftThe Atrio, as it is called, has little immediate resemblance to the atrium of a Roman domus. with the stairs leading to the vaulted frescoed Sala of the former council chamber of the Priori on the piano nobile; the Sala was allocated to the notaries guild in 1582, as the Sala dei Notari, when their former quarters, the Palazzetto dei Notari, on the opposite side of the Corso were partially demolished in a street widening. On the left is the entrance to the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria one of the most outstanding provincial Italian collections of art.

The two end houses were to have ionic pilasters and the central houses were to have a pediment, identical to the facade of Norfolk Crescent. The terrace was to be completely level, but the ground slopes down towards the river (at the west end of the row) so the street would have been built up on vaults, as at the south end of Norfolk Crescent. Each house was five storeys high (basement, ground floor, piano nobile, second floor and attic). Unlike many other Bath houses, the attic windows are in the main facade, not in the roof.

The palazzo in which the theatre was situated had been originally constructed in 1451 by Cardinal Domenico Capranica, to serve as both his own residence and the future home of the Almo Collegio Capranica, a college for young clerics which he founded in 1457. One of the few remaining examples of Roman residential architecture of the early renaissance, it has a large side tower and a piano nobile lit by three cross mullion windows as well as three windows in the late Gothic style which suggest that the palace may have incorporated an earlier building on the site.Ferrari-Bravo p. 353; Richardson p.

Currently it is the local office for the Unicredit (was a headquarter of Rolo Banca and Credito Romagnolo ). Among the most important artworks in the interior is the frescoed frieze of Histories of the Foundation of Rome executed in 1590 by the brothers Ludovico, Annibale and Agostino Carracci in the salone on the piano nobile. Also notable is the monumental chimney by Ambrosini, decorated by statues of Minerva and Mars by Gabriele Fiorini, and surmounted by the Lupercalia by Annibale Carracci. In the inner courtyard is a statue of "Hercules" whose face is that of Lorenzo Magnani, who had commissioned the Carracci’s frieze.

Another surprising feature of the plan is the thickness of the main body of the building (corps de logis), which consists of two rows of rooms running east and west. Traditionally, the middle of the corps de logis of French chateaux consisted of a single row of rooms. Double-thick corps de logis had already been used in hôtels particuliers in Paris, including Le Vau's Hôtel Tambonneau, but Vaux was the first chateau to incorporate this change. Even more unusual, the main rooms are all on the ground floor rather than the first floor (the traditional piano nobile).

The finest rooms were decorated by Pietro da Cortona in the high baroque style. Initially Cortona frescoed a small room on the piano nobile called the Sala della Stufa with a series depicting the Four Ages of Man which were very well received; the Age of Gold and Age of Silver were painted in 1637, followed in 1641 by the Age of Bronze and Age of Iron. They are regarded among his masterpieces. The artist was subsequently asked to fresco the grand ducal reception rooms; a suite of five rooms at the front of the palazzo.

In Britain, by the beginning of the 19th century, the Baroque convention of placing the grandest reception rooms on the upper floor or piano nobile had been discontinued; therefore, the upper floor at Arlington contains only bedrooms, dressing rooms and nurseries. Many of these have now been transformed into accommodation for National Trust staff. Among the few upper rooms open to the public are Miss Chichester’s Bedroom, the former day nursery, the Blue Bedroom and the Portico Bedroom . The latter, sited over the Entrance hall, was traditionally the bedroom of the master of the house; it is distinguished by its vaulted ceiling.

The nine-bay three-storey east front is mostly Elizabethan in style and has Wyatt's single-storey extension protruding from its centre. The courtyard was remodelled by Leoni, who gave it a rusticated cloister on all sides. Above the cloister the architecture differs on the four sides although all the windows on the first (piano nobile) floor have pediments. On the west side is a one-bay centrepiece with a window between two Doric pilasters; on the south and north are three windows with four similar pilasters; and on the east front is the grand entrance with a portal in a Tuscan aedicule.

Subsequently leaned against the front of the Carmelites convent on the opposite side of the road, and long believed to have been lost during the demolition works, the fountain has been found in the municipal storerooms.Federico (2016),p. 273 Up ahead, on the north side, at the n. 46, Buto, a doctor active during the reign of Paul III, let erect a palazzetto whose façade was adorned with the busts of Galenus and Hippocrates and on the friezes of the three windows at the piano nobile bore the inscription "DEO, PAULO ET LABORIBUS" ("To God, Paul (III) and (my) works"); Gigli (1990) p.

This ceiling was already old-fashioned when it was finished, and the rest of the room was decorated in a far simpler mode. When Baroque interior decoration did occur, as elsewhere in Italy, the finest and most decorated rooms were those on the piano nobile, reserved for guests and entertaining. Occasionally, however, the late date of completion means that the decoration can be described as Rococo – the flamboyant swan song of the Baroque era. A further reason for the absence of Baroque decoration, and the most common, is that most rooms were never intended for public view and, therefore, expensive decoration.

The villa's interiors are arranged over five floors, each floor designed for a different function. The main rooms are located on the first floor or piano nobile, where a large central loggia (now glazed in) looks down over the town, its main street and the surrounding countryside. This hall is known as the Room of Hercules on account of its fresco decorations,Partridge, Loren W. "The Sala d'Ercole in the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, Part I" The Art Bulletin 53.4 (December 1971:467-486), "Part II" The Art Bulletin 54.1 (March 1972:50-62). and was used as a summer dining hall.

Construction for the "villa di delizia" (or villa of delights) was begun in 1703 and concluded in 1719, commissioned by Giacinto Alari (1668-1753) from the architect Giovanni Ruggeri. The piano nobile was decorated with stucco and frescoes in 1720-1725. The design of the interior decoration is also assigned to Ruggeri, but the mythologic and allegoric frescoes were completed with the help of Giovanni Angelo Borroni, Francesco Fabbrica, Pietro Maggi, Salvatore Bianchi, Giovanni Antonio Cucchi, and Francesco Bianchi. At one time the private rooms had genre and pastoral paintings respectively by the painters Enrico Albricci and Francesco Londonio.

Jean Baptiste Androuet du Cerceau (1544/47-1590) was a French architect who designed the Pont Neuf (1579), spanning the Seine, Paris, and became supervisor of the royal works under Henri III and Henri IV, including the Louvre. Several hôtels particuliers are ascribed to him. The Hôtel d'Angoulême, the Hôtel de Lamoignon (1584), which houses the Historical Library of the City of Paris, and the Hôtel de Mayenne (rue St-Antoine in the Marais). The Hôtel de Mayenne, with rhythmically varied dormer windows set in a high slate roof, has the pediments of its piano nobile windows superposed on the frieze above.

While the remainder of the house is on three floors of equal value in the English style, the south front has a low rusticated ground floor, almost suggesting a semi-basement. Three small porches project at this level only, one at the centre, and one at each end of the facade, providing small balconies to the windows above. The next floor is the piano nobile, at its centre the great double-height Venetian window, ornamented at second floor level by the Pembroke arms in stone relief. This central window is flanked by four tall sash windows on each side.

What is definite is that Inigo Jones now working with another architect John Webb (his nephew by marriage to Jones' niece) returned once again to Wilton. Because of the uncertainty of the fire damage to the structure of the house, the only work that can be attributed with any degree of certainty to the new partnership is the redesign of the interior of the seven state-rooms contained on the piano nobile of the south wing; and even here the extent of Jones' presence is questioned. It appears he may have been advising from a distance, using Webb as his medium.

120 The building, which in 1537 had been completed until its piano nobile, was erroneously named after king Pyrrhus of Epirus because of a statue (actually of Mars) once on display on a yard's niche and now at the Musei Capitolini. The edifice is adjacent to the palace named Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, realized in those years by Baldassare Peruzzi and commissioned by Angelo's brother Pietro. Palazzo Massimo di Pirro is Mangone's only certain architectural work still extant. In this building his model is Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, of whom he adopts typological schemes and - partially - stylistic features.

The Winter Palace has a twelve-bay flat Baroque façade with three portals, each given double corbels that support a balcony and decorated balustrade. In place of standard columns or pillars, Fischer von Erlach designed bas-reliefs depicting military scenes from ancient mythology—Hercules fighting the giant Antaeus on the left, and Aeneas saving his father Anchises from burning Troy on the right. These images from the classical world are meant to invoke Prince Eugene's glorious military accomplishments. Above each portal are tall windows of the piano nobile, made distinct from the other windows by their reversed segmented pediments with insert cartouches.

The church and parish school were located in the same building, a common school-above-church design feature of several New York City parishes. It is a red brick multistory Collegiate Gothic structure with Decorated Gothic and Tudor Gothic design elements with terracotta trim over a raised field-stone basement and entrance breakfront. The church was located at the building's piano nobile, above the raised basement and accessed by both a perron through an ornate Tudor-arched entrance and a second flight within the building. The school was located on the two floors above the church.

Adam Birtwistle was born in Eton in 1959 and is the son of the composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle and brother of the artist Silas Birtwistle. After attending schools in Britain and the US, he studied sculpture for four years at Chelsea School of Art and followed this with two years at the Arch Bronze Foundry, working with Ben Kneale. In 1985 he took part in designing masks and costumes for one of his father’s music theatre pieces at Dartington Summer School of Music. In 1986 he attended printing classes at the Royal Academy while preparing his first one-man show in London with Piano Nobile Fine Paintings.

One of Veronese's frescoes The interior of the piano nobile is painted with frescoes by Paolo Veronese in the artist's most contemporary style of the period. These paintings constitute the most important fresco cycle by this artist and were inspirational to many of the frescoes painted by other villa artists at that time. The frescoes have been dated to the beginning of the 1560s, or slightly before. To describe the frescoes by room: in the Hall of Olympus, Veronese painted Giustiniana, mistress of the house and wife of Marcantonio Barbaro, with her youngest son, wetnurse and the family pets, a parrot and spaniel dog.

In front of the Turkish Suite, a reading room (now the members lounge), shoe hall and entrance hall were added using more traditional building methods. The architect did a workmanlike, and it has to be said, sensible job, in simply copying the details of the original building in terms of window groupings onto his extension; nonetheless, a change in eaves level marked it as a separate construction to the south end of the existing building in the form of a single storey "piano nobile" with service spaces below, it extended the facade of the building southwards across the front of the Turkish suite and created the current grand entrance.

Beginning in 1666, Johann Seyfried von Eggenberg, grandson of Hans Ulrich, developed the palace according to the splendor and grandeur of the Baroque style and in 1673 the residence again entered the limelight as Archduchess Claudia Felicitas of Tyrol was a guest in the palace on the occasion of her wedding in Graz to Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor.Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 68. Under Prince Johann Seyfried, the comprehensive cycle of ceiling coverings of approximately 600 paintings in the rooms of the piano nobile was accomplished in just 7 years. Hans Adam Weissenkircher began his service as the court painter of the princely Eggenberger court in 1678.

Tinniswood (1999), 11, 22, 72) with current designs. Piano nobile of Belton House. 1:Marble Hall; 2:Great Staircase; 3:Bedchamber, now Blue Room; 4:Sweetmeat closet; 5:Back stairs & east entrance; 6:Chapel Drawing Room; 7:Chapel (double height); 8:Tyrconnel Room; 9:Saloon; 10:Red Drawing Room; 11:Little Parlour (now Tapestry Room); 12:School Room; 13:Closet; 14:Back stairs & west entrance; 15:Service Room (now Breakfast Room); 16:Upper storey of kitchen, (now Hondecoeter Room); Please note: This is an unscaled plan for illustrative purposes only. The second floor has a matching fenestration, with windows of equal value to those on the first floor below.

Blenheim Palace, unscaled plan of the piano nobile. An enfilade of 9 state rooms runs the length of the southern facade of the palace (marked "N" to "G" at the top of the figure). It is a tribute to the craftsmanship of the carpenters who installed the doors between the rooms that with the keys removed it is possible to look through them all, from one end of the enfilade to the other. Key A: Hall; B: Saloon; C: Green Writing Room; L: Red Drawing Room; M: Green Drawing Room; N: Grand Cabinet; H: Library; J: covered colonnade; K: Birth Room of Sir Winston Churchill; H2: Chapel; O: Bow room.

218 The new fashion extended to architecture and incorporated elements from the growing interest in the picturesque. Designs became more rustic, houses became lower and seemingly smaller, often at the expense of the servants comfort, as the still essential domestic quarters were forced out of sight, often underground or onto a separate wing of their own. It was this separate wing which led to the break in symmetry so rigorously enforced by the preceding diktats of architecture, thus complementing the contrived informality of the architecture. Houghton Lodge exemplifies this Cottage Ornée style; the principal reception rooms are placed on the ground floor, rather than on a piano nobile.

At the time of its building, the design of Basildon was already old-fashioned. From 1750s onwards large houses were being built without a rustic, and having the principal floor on the ground was becoming commonplace. Basildon, with its piano nobile, large portico denoting status, and main facade falsely elongated by fenestrated walls, was never innovative architecture, but, like many other houses, was built to bolster the status of its owner, the newly rich Sir Francis Sykes, keen for a political career. Basildon is not one of the great houses of Britain; houses of similar style and size exist the length of the country.

The Pinacotecta Nazionale () is an art gallery in Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. It is located on the piano nobile (or first floor) of the Palazzo dei Diamanti, a work of Renaissance architecture by Biagio Rossetti, commissioned by Leonello d’Este in 1447. Not to be confused with the Civic Museum on the lower floor, which has hosted temporary exhibitions of contemporary art since 1992, the Pinacoteca houses a collection of paintings by the Ferrarese School dating from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It was founded in 1836 by the Municipality of Ferrara after Napoleon's widespread dissolution of churches threatened the protection of important public artworks.

The first floor piano nobile is evident by its large casement windows proportionately taller than those below or above. On the principal facade these aedicular windows have segmental pediments supported on the flanking Ionic columns; they are given extra prominence by the small wrought iron balconies supported by limestone corbels. The windows of the second floor clearly denote it as containing secondary accommodation, while the windows of the third and top floor are smaller still, clearly indicating a lower status than those below. The upper floor contains masonry panels and is intended to complement the enriched entablature, frieze and boldly projecting cornice immediately above it.

Instead, Michelozzo focused on the contrast between surface textures, such as the contrast between "the natural rustication of the ground floor, the flat ashlared courses of the piano nobile and the smooth masonry of the upper storey." The exterior also differs from the palazzo in Montepulciano in its size, its more urbane character, and its massive classicizing cornice. "In its succession of dentils, egg-and-dart and consoles, Michelozzo directly followed the Temple of Serapis in Rome." Brunelleschi's influence on Michelozzo is evident in the palazzo's design, especially in the late-medieval bifora windows, the symmetry and the dominance of the entrance axis, and the combination of traditional and progressive elements.

Towards the rear facing Hubert St, the building, assumes a more domestic character, with a prominent and richly detailed awning, a separate, smaller hipped roof, and a chimney which rises above the roof line. The southern (rear) frontage has a deep timber verandah, and the western frontage overlooking the service lane is unrendered and undecorated. The building has deep eaves with shaped rafter ends. The two street-facing elevations have horizontal tripartite ornamentation, comprising: a square-snecked rubble stone plinth; cement string course to ground floor sill level; course aggregate rendered walls to the piano nobile; and unrendered brickwork expressed as pilasters above a first floor string course.

Simplified, unscaled plan of the piano nobile at Holkham, showing the four symmetrical wings at each corner of the principal block. South is at the top of the plan. 'A' Marble Hall; 'B' The Saloon; 'C' Statue Gallery, with octagonal tribunes at each end; 'D' Dining room (the classical apse, gives access to the tortuous and discreet route by which the food reached the dining room from the distant kitchen), 'E' The South Portico; 'F' The Library in the self-contained family wing IV. 'L' Green State Bedroom; 'O' Chapel. The Palladian style was admired by Whigs such as Thomas Coke, who sought to identify themselves with the Romans of antiquity.

Manglard's talent as a marine painter "was such that his career advanced rapidly: prestigious clients included Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy and King of Piedmont, who bought two matching pieces from him in 1726 (Turin, Galleria Sabauda), and Philip, Duke of Parma (d 1765)." Philip alone commissioned more than 140 paintings from Manglard to decorate his palaces. Manglard also enjoyed the patronage of the most important Roman families, including the Colonna, the Orsini, the Rondani, the Rospigliosi and the Chigi. For the Chigi he frescoed two rooms on the piano nobile of the Palazzo Chigi, today the official residence of the Prime Minister of Italy.

Seaton Delaval Hall courtyard Further restoration was completed in 1959 and the early 1960s, including replacement of windows in the central block, restoration of the upstairs gallery in the main hall, and paving of the floors on the piano nobile. However, the house was to remain unoccupied until the 1980s when, after a period of 160 years, Edward Delaval Henry Astley, 22nd Baron Hastings moved into the west wing. It became his permanent home until his death in 2007. Subsequently the new 23rd Baron Hastings, Delaval Astley, wishing to preserve the future of the Hall and encourage greater public access, began discussions with the National Trust.

The former United Mine Workers of America Building is located in downtown Washington, at the northwest corner of "I" and 15th Streets NW. One facade faces east toward McPherson Square across 15th Street, the other toward I Street. It is a six- story masonry structure, with a frame of steel and terra cotta blocks and an exterior facing of brick, limestone and bluestone. It is essentially Renaissance Revival in style, with tall rounded-arch windows on the second level, which serves as a piano nobile. The first two levels are finished in limestone, the ground floor with a rusticated finish, while the upper floors are mainly clad in buff brick.

The ground floor of Stevenson's adjoining cottage was restored and its ruined first floor replaced with a new piano nobile, designed and built by Ted Cullinan. Building work was carried out under lease in 1956 and the lighthouse was brought up to date with modern amenities. In 1986, the BBC purchased the lease to Belle Tout for the filming of mini-series The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and a year later it featured in the James Bond film The Living Daylights. From 1996 the lighthouse was used as a family home and, in 2007, the building was put up for sale again.

Any visiting foreigner, especially from a distant European metropolis, was regarded as a special trophy and added social prestige. Hence the Sicilian aristocrat's home was seldom empty or quiet. Illustration 17: The flamboyant staircase at the Palazzo Biscari The rooms of the piano nobile were entered formally from an external Baroque double staircase: they consisted of a suite of large and small salons, with one very large salon being the principal room of the house, often used as a ballroom. Sometimes the guest bedrooms were sited here too, but by the end of the 18th century they were more often on a secondary floor above.

Most villas and palazzi were designed for formal entrance by a carriage through an archway in the street façade, leading to a courtyard within. An intricate double staircase would lead from the courtyard to the piano nobile. This would be the palazzo's principal entrance to the first-floor reception rooms; the symmetrical flights of steps would turn inwards and outwards as many as four times. Owing to the topography of their elevated sites it was often necessary to approach churches by many steps; these steps were often transformed into long straight marble staircases, in themselves decorative architectural features (illustration 19), in the manner of the Spanish Steps in Rome.

A signed bronze reduction of the Borghese Hermaphroditus is at the Metropolitan Museum. His bronze reduction of the Laocoön (an example is now in the Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna) is likely based on the copy of it in Florence. As a sculptor, Susini is known for some public commissions, such as the Fontana del Carciofo ("Artichoke Fountain", 1641), that stands centered with the piano nobile windows of the Palazzo Pitti's garden façade. The model for this final ensemble, according to the chronicler of artists Filippo Baldinucci, had been completed and approved in 1639; but like many productions for the Medici Grand Dukes, the fountain was a team project with a complicated history.

The courtyard of Burlington House Sometimes the courtyard hosts temporary sculptures or exhibitions, such as this one in 2009 The courtyard of Burlington House, known as the "Annenberg Courtyard", is open to the public during the day. It features a statue of Joshua Reynolds and fountains arranged in the pattern of the planets at the time of his birth. The Royal Academy's public art exhibitions are staged in nineteenth-century additions to the main block which are of little architectural interest. However, in 2004 the principal reception rooms on the piano nobile were opened to the public after restoration as the "John Madejski Fine Rooms".

Matsalen ("Dining Room") or Stora konferensrummet ("Great Conference Room") was originally divided into three separate rooms during Torstensson, but these were united into a single space in the mid-18th century and are since then used for official dinners and conferences. On the walls hang the portraits of past Minister for Foreign Affairs and a large portrait of Axel Oxenstierna. Stora salongen ("Great Salon") or Blå salongen ("Blue Salon") is a salon designed by the Louis Masreliez in a style called Late Gustavian. This, the central and largest room in the piano nobile, was used as an archive during WWII and was at the time in a bad shape.

The five-story Renaissance style limestone town house was designed by Carrère and Hastings, who were also responsible for the design of the New York Public Library, and is regarded as one of their finest residences. The design of the limestone-clad building, which unusually for a Manhattan town house offers a finished side elevation as well as its street front, is strongly influenced by 16th- and 18th-century Italian palazzo details. The ground floor has pronounced banded rustication, a motif which is taken through the three floors above in the pilaster-like quoining at each corner of the building. The first floor piano nobile is evident by its large casement windows proportionately taller than those below or above.

The principal entrance is on the ground floor at the centre of the facade. The palace comprises four floors, the two lowest, secondary floors, are a semi-basement and a mezzanine; both these floors form a rustic base to the two principal floors above. The third floor is a piano nobile and has tall casement windows; the fourth floor only has windows in the five central bays, the flanking seven bay wings at fourth floor level are adorned with heavy armorial bass relief panels. The central columned five bays are surmounted by a pediment, which once displayed the Branitsky arms, the coat of arms was defaced after the Russian Revolution, but the sculpted decoration which supported the arms remains.

Contained behind the southern facade are the principal state apartments; on the east side are the suites of private apartments of the Duke and Duchess, and on the west along the entire length of the piano nobile is given a long gallery originally conceived as a picture gallery, but is now the library. The corps de logis is flanked by two further service blocks around square courtyards (not shown in the plan). The east court contains the kitchens, laundry, and other domestic offices, the west court adjacent to the chapel the stables and indoor riding school. The three blocks together form the "Great Court" designed to overpower the visitor arriving at the palace.

In any case, the builder of Basildon was not eminent enough to require a suite of state apartments on the piano nobile in permanent expectation of a royal visit. Thus, in keeping with this newly found spirit of informality Basildon has no formal and symmetrical enfilade of rooms of increasing splendour, but two separate first floor suites, one feminine and one masculine, were placed on either side of the hall. The library (10 on plan), considered a masculine room, was placed next to the owner Sir Francis Sykes' dressing room (9) while on the opposite side of the hall (11 and 12) were the bedroom and dressing room of Lady Sykes.Pugh, p10.

Central to the multifaceted conception are an ensemble of historic interior rooms. The cycle of 24 staterooms with original accouterments and period furnishings from the 17th and 18th centuries counts among the most significant ensembles of historic interiors in Austria. The climax of this piano nobile is the Planetary Room, which owes its name to the cycle of ceiling and wall paintings (completed in 1685) that adorn it, by court painter Hans Adam Weissenkircher. His elegant melding of astrological and hermetic images, numerology and family mythology into a complicated allegory of the "Golden Age" of the House of Eggenberg is counted among the most important and impressive systems of early Baroque room-art in Central Europe.

The house, situated in the fashionable parish of St George's, Hanover Square, Westminster, was built in 1756–1761 by Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of Egremont (1710–1763), of Orchard Wyndham in Somerset and of Petworth House in Sussex, Secretary of State for the Southern Department from 1761 to 1763, and was thus first known as Egremont House. The building is in the late Palladian style, to the design of the architect Matthew Brettingham. It has three main storeys plus basement and attics, and is seven bays wide. As is usual in a London mansion of the period, the first floor (piano nobile, "second floor" in American English) is the principal floor, containing a circuit of reception rooms.

On axis at the front façade of the villa is the Limonaia, a semi-walled potted lemon garden, accented with statues by Giuseppe Mazzuoli (1644-1725) and 'Baroque style' topiary. On axis at the rear façade a symmetrical double staircase rises to the primary villa entry, at the piano nobile ('floor one') level, following the Roman custom of reserving the ground floor unnumbered for the domestic service uses. Behind the villa an avenue (allée) of Italian cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) defines the axis through gardens and fields to the base of the hill. A significant and very long stone stairway carries the axis up through the hillside's woodlands, to the focal point of the hermitage tower.

Exterior: The symmetrical main block (which excludes the single west wing, added in 1815) consists of three stories: a basement, a piano nobile main floor, and an attic half-story. The corners are decorated with quoins. The front (south) elevation, which is the only one in which the limestone is finished, consists of seven bays: six with main floor windows (the extreme right and left are double width) and the center one with the main entry. Twelve steps ascend the elevated front portico, with its prominent pediment and four Tuscan-style columns, which encompasses the three central bays – of which the middle one has the main door and door surround, framed by two pilasters also of the Tuscan order.

The main floor – the piano nobile – of the château neuf was given over entirely to two apartments: one for the king, and one for the queen. The grand appartement du roi occupied the northern part of the château neuf and grand appartement de la reine occupied the southern part. View of the garden front, 1674, after the second building capmpaign, engraving by Israël Silvestre Garden façade of the Palace of Versailles, ca. 1675, with the terrace that later became the Hall of Mirrors The western part of the enveloppe was given over almost entirely to a terrace, which was later enclosed with the construction of the Hall of Mirrors (Galerie des Glaces).

Despite Lienau's work, Second Empire did not displace dominant styles of the 1850s, Italianate and Gothic Revival and remained associated with only particularly wealthy patrons. The first major Second Empire structure designed by an American architect was James Renwick's gallery, now the Renwick Gallery designed for William Wilson Corcoran (1859-1860). Renwick's gallery was one of the first major public buildings in the style, and its favorable reception furthered interest in Second Empire design. These early buildings display a close affinity to the high-style designs found in the new Louvre construction, with quoins, stone detailing, carved elements and sculpture, a strong division between base and piano nobile, pavilioned roofs, and pilasters.

Copplestone, p245. It may be that Bizzaccheri's work was altered; circa 1746 the building was acquired by the newly ennobled Negroni family who sometime between acquiring ownership and 1759 modernised the principal facade, creating its present-day appearance.The approximate date of the work has been calculated from various sources by Mallory, p41 This work included the Baroque pediments of the second floor windows and the pediments of the mezzanine floor. The latter were decorated with sheaths and arrows from the Negroni coat of arms, while the central pediment of the piano nobile was given extra prominence by the addition of a Negro's head in bas relief, the armorial crest of the Negroni.

The statuary decorating the roofscape was never executed. The carriage ramp is an unusual feature, leading to the piano nobile. Bramham is a product of a grand tour; its creator Robert Benson, later Lord Bingley, completed his formal education with a grand tour in 1697, and whilst in Italy he began to envisage his new mansion in the Palladian manner complemented in a landscaped park, in the fashion made popular by Le Nôtre in France in the late 17th century. The architect of Bramham is unknown, although it is speculated that Giacomo Leoni was involved Bramham Park (Leoni was responsible for the rebuilding of Lyme Park in an Italianate style in the neighbouring county of Cheshire some years later).

There he used his sketchbooks (now in the library of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, London) to produce the original drawings (now in the Royal Institute of British Architects) for Wood's The Ruins of Balbec and The Ruins of Palmyra, and from 1752 to 1760 carried out commissions for English patrons. These works and their images led to motifs from Baalbek and Palmyra becoming fashionable for ceiling and interior decorations in England and Italy (Borra used them, for example, in his own work on the south facade of the Palazzo Isnardi and the interior decoration of its Sala d'Ercole and Sala di Diana, on the piano nobile). He is thought to have died in Turin.

It contains all the rooms necessary for the grandees who inhabit the house. It usually consists of a central salon or saloon (the grandest room beneath the central pediment); on either side of the saloon (in the wings) there is often a slightly less grand, withdrawing room, and then a principal bedroom. After that perhaps would follow a smaller more intimate room, a "cabinet". The point both the Duchess and owners of Wortley had failed to grasp was that the owners lived in 'state' on the 'piano nobile' and had no need to go upstairs, hence only secondary/back staircases would reach the floors that were occupied by children, servants and less favoured guests.

597 Other members of his family include General Mario Nicolis di Robilant, who commanded the Italian Fourth Army at Monte Grappa during World War I. His great-great-great-great grandmother, Lucia Memmo, married Alvise Mocenigo, a member of the House of Mocenigo that played a pivotal role in Venice's history. In 1818, Lucia rented the piano nobile of Palazzo Mocenigo to Lord Byron, who wrote parts of Don Juan at the family mansion, and hosted illustrious figures such as François-René de Chateaubriand and Effie Ruskin throughout her life.Lucia's father, Andrea Memmo, was the Venetian ambassador to the Papal States and a prominent citizen of the Republic of Venice.Both of di Robilant's ancestors became subjects of his books.

Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, Pope Paul III's nephew, commissioned Annibale Carracci and his workshop to decorate the barrel-vaulted gallery on the piano nobile of the family palace. Work was started in 1597 and was not entirely finished until 1608, one year before Annibale's death.When the Farnese frescoes were nearly complete, Cardinal Odoardo paid him an insultingly small sum of 500 scudi d'oro or pieces of gold which were brought to his room on a saucer. Annibale, physically exhausted after his work on the vault and profoundly upset by his brother Agostino's defection, reacted sharply to his patron's callous and ungrateful behavior and fell into a state of depression, lasting until his death in 1609.

In 2009 she coordinated Stepping into the Light, an exhibition of work by California State University Dominguez Hills students in aid of sexually assaulted women. Hirsch has also pursued an interest in architecture, and over a period of 35 years restored a 1900s duplex in Venice, California.2010 Cottages in the Sun: Bungalows of Venice, California, Margaret Bach (Author), Melba Levick (Photographer), Rizzoli, Mar. 2; 2007 Hirsch has shown work at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles, CA (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009), and 2011 Vincent Gallery, Moscow, Russia, 2009 Symbol Galeria, Budapest (Hungary), 2007 Piano Nobile Gallery, Kraków (Poland), 2006 Soviart Gallery, Kiev (Ukraine), 2006 Artoteka Gallery, Bratislava and 2005 Limes Galeria, Komarno (Slovakia).

Thus the main facade onto Arlington Street was modulated by means of two pavilions, located at either end of the building with the centre marked by arched windows arranged in groups of threes. The effect is that of a restrained and modest Classicism, more rural than urban in its nature, well proportioned and pleasing in an unpretentious way. To describe the design as Palladian would perhaps be to stretch a point too far – although Palladio did draw his influence from Roman Farm buildings. Nonetheless, Italianate influence is obvious not only in the balance of the elements but also in the use of a "piano nobile" by which the main spaces are built on top of a semi basement level containing smaller spaces servicing the larger accommodation above.

Blenheim, the largest non-royal domestic building in England, consists of three blocks, the centre containing the living and state rooms, and two flanking rectangular wings both built around a central courtyard: one contains the stables, and the other the kitchens, laundries, and storehouses. If Castle Howard was the first truly baroque building in England, then Blenheim Palace is the most definitive. While Castle Howard is a dramatic assembly of restless masses, Blenheim is altogether of a more solid construction, relying on tall slender windows and monumental statuary on the roofs to lighten the mass of yellow stone. The suite of state rooms placed on the piano nobile were designed to be overpowering and magnificent displays, rather than warm, or comfortable.

The student rooms are divided according to the sides of the building: "Piazza" ("Square") on the western side, facing Piazza Borromeo, "Giardino" ("Garden") on the south side, "Vicolo" ("Lane") on the north side, looking onto Via Cardinal Tosi. The east side is called "Richini", as it is situated on a seventeenth-century garden designed by Francesco Maria Richini, and houses two auditorium-style rooms ("White Room" and "Mural Room") with private upstairs rooms for guests. The rooms are also divided into several levels: "Mezzanino" (mezzanine), "Nobile" (piano nobile), "Paradiso" (second mezzanine) and "Iperuranio" (attic). Also on the south side are "Sangiovannino alto" and "basso" ("Upper" and "Lower"), saved from the Church of San Giovanni in Borgo before demolition in the nineteenth century.

Many of the former private rooms are not regularly open to the public, or have been much changed. The piano nobile of the Winter Palace. The private apartments are shaded pink. Rooms are given their pre-1918 titles. 1: Malachite Drawing Room; 2: Empire Drawing Room; 3: Silver Drawing Room; 4: Sitting room; 5: Bedroom of Alexandra Feodorovna; 6: Boudoir; 7: Nicholas II's study; 8: Small Dining Room; 9: Library; 10: Billiard Room; 11: Tsar's Audience Room (next: Saltykov Staircase) 12: 14: Alexander II's study; 19: Bedroom of Maria Alexandrovna; 20: Crimson Boudoir; 21: Crimson cabinet; 22: Gold Drawing Room; 23: HM's Own Staircase; 25: Dining Room; 26: Schoolroom; 28: The Rotunda; 29: Chapel; 30: Arabian Hall; 31: Winter Garden; 32: White Hall.

Tha palace on Piazza Croce dei Vespri The ballroom of the Palazzo Gangi Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi is the large ancestral townhouse first of the Princes Valguarnera and then of the Princes Gangi, situated in the Piazza Croce dei Vespri, Palermo, Sicily. The house was constructed in several phases during the 18th century and completed in circa 1780. The palace is designed in the Baroque style, although its ornamentation is of a more severe form In respect of what is generally accepted as Sicilian Baroque. The tall windows of the piano nobile are decorated with alternating pointed and segmented pediments, while the windows of the lower and upper floors are much smaller, almost cell like, indicating a more modest function of the rooms they belong.

The latter was originally designed by Avanzini and as a large rectangular "pool" surrounded by a boundary wall in the form of a ruined amphitheatre, for which it earned its sobriquet the "Fontanazzo" (Rough Fountain). Highlights of the complex also include larger-than-life fountain sculptures based on the designs of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Renaissance fresco fragments by Nicolò dell’Abbate recovered from the Scandiano palace in Reggio Emilia. Restoration of the piano nobile in 2001 has allowed the palace to be equally used as a space for contemporary art exhibitions, fusing past and present. Terminating the tour of the Duke and Duchesses’ private and public apartments on the first floor, the Stuccoed apartments have hosted the exhibition “MONOCHROMATIC LIGHT” since 2003.

The Cardinal Francesco Martelli (1633–1717) was a member of this family. In 1738, Giuseppe Martelli Maria, Archbishop of Florence and Niccolo Martelli, bailiff of Florence, unified the palaces under the designs of the architect Bernardino Ciurini. The piano nobile of the palace was decorated by frescoes by Vincenzo Meucci, Ferdinando Melani, Niccolò Connestabile, and Bernardo Minozzi, as well as stuccowork by Giovanni Martino Portogalli. At the end of the eighteenth century Marco, son of Niccolo, commissioned further frescoes depicting mythological and historic episodes of the family from teams led by Tommaso Gherardini, while Luigi Sabatelli decorated the vault of the staircase, where they displayed once two works attributed to Donatello, a statue of David and the coat of arms of the family.

The Cebu Provincial Capitol is dramatically positioned at the end of a grand perspective of a new avenue (Osmeña Boulevard) as conceived by William E. Parsons in his 1912 plan of Cebu, in the lines of the City Beautiful Movement. The building follows an H-shaped plan, one side opening to the terminus of Osmeña Boulevard. The main block or corps de logis, three stories high, is flanked by two secondary wings, symmetrically advancing to embrace a rectangular, elevated cour d'honneur that serves as an entrance podium. The elevation of the corps de logis is of typical neoclassical formula: a rusticated ground floor, containing minor rooms and offices, the piano nobile above, with the most important spaces, and finally the attic story.

Gilded stucco in the Bedchamber of the King The apartments on the piano nobile today form a part of the Musée des arts décoratifs. The chambers of the prince-bishops and cardinals of the House of Rohan are divided into the grand appartement (display space, facing the river, or south) and petit appartement (living space, facing the inner court and the cathedral, or north), as in the Palace of Versailles.Recht, Foessel, Klein, p. 71. On either side of the suites are the two most spacious rooms of the palace, the Synod Hall (a single, vast room composed of the dining hall and the guards' hall, separated by a row of arches) and the library, which both extend over the entire longitudinal axis of the wing.

The niches in the piers that alternate with columns of the Loggiato filled with sculptures of famous artists in the 19th century. Cosimo de' Medici by Luigi Magi and Andrea Di Cione (Orcagna) by Niccolò Bazzanti The Uffizi brought together under one roof the administrative offices and the Archivio di Stato, the state archive. The project was intended to display prime art works of the Medici collections on the piano nobile; the plan was carried out by his son, Grand Duke Francesco I. He commissioned the architect Buontalenti to design the Tribuna degli Uffizi that would display a series of masterpieces in one room, including jewels; it became a highly influential attraction of a Grand Tour. The octagonal room was completed in 1584.

Their only child to survive infancy, Edward Coke, Viscount Coke, had died without issue in 1753. The house is designed with a corps de logis containing the state rooms on the first floor (piano nobile), surrounded by four wings: to the south-west the family wing, to the north-west the guest wing, to the south-east the chapel wing and to the north-east the kitchen wing. With all the intervening doors open it is possible to stand in the Long Library and look down the full length of the southern State Rooms and see the east window of the Chapel in the opposing wing the full length of the house. The family wing is a self-contained residence, meant for daily living.

It is obvious from the materials and architectural features of the remaining structure that the building was constructed, at least in layout if not in ornament, to the latest Renaissance fashion. The lower or ground floor level is built of thin limestone blocks, is very plain and has small mullioned windows, meaning it was probably used as the domestic area of the house, where the servants would have worked, but probably not slept. The upper level is built in red brick in English bond and most probably constitutes a piano nobile, a principle still very much new in Northern Europe at the time. Brick at the time, although having been used previously, had rarely been in use in British secular architecture before this period.

Tiepolo was born in 1696. While still a young man in his 20s, he was commissioned by , the Patriarch of Aquileia, to decorate the Cappella del Santissimo Sacramento in Udine Cathedral (completed 1726) and then to paint a two cycles of Old Testament paintings for the (or arcivescovado) in Udine (completed 1726–1728), including and . The paintings from the Patriarchal Palace are now displayed in Udine's . Still only in his early 30s, Tiepolo was then commissioned by Dionisio's brother to paint a series of ten painting depicting scenes from Ancient Rome for a large reception room on the piano nobile at the family's house in Venice, the Ca' Dolfin building, on the north side of the just off the Grand Canal.

182.) include the grand appartement du roi and the grand appartement de la reine. They occupied the main or principal floor of the château neuf, with three rooms in each apartment facing the garden to the west and four facing the garden parterres to the north and south, respectively. The private apartments of the king (the appartement du roi and the petit appartement du roi) and those of the queen (the petit appartement de la reine) remained in the château vieux (old château). Le Vau's design for the state apartments closely followed Italian models of the day, including the placement of the apartments on the main floor (the piano nobile, the next floor up from the ground level), a convention the architect borrowed from Italian palace design.

The loggia is connected to the main floor and acts as an element of mediation between the avenue itself and the access to the building, without interrupting the perspective axis that from the entrance crosses the entire structure as well as the terrace garden. The garden, bordered by a peperino balustrade with marble columns, is surrounded to the east by a long portico closed by glass walls, used as a greenhouse. The rooms on the piano nobile are projected towards the panorama via the large level terraces placed to the side of the northern and southern elevations. Embankment of Villa Belvedere Of the prominence of Villa Belvedere we find numerous testimonies also in the eighteenth-century vedutismo of the city of Naples.

The Great Ante-Chamber, the Winter Palace, St Petersburg, by Konstantin Ukhtomsky (1861) The Great Ante-Chamber of the Winter Palace is the principal entrance hall to the state apartments of the palace. The first room of the piano nobile at the head of the Jordan staircase, it formed the processional exit of the Neva enfilade, and presented a procession with a choice, either to descend the staircase and exit the palace, which happened once a year for the ceremony of blessing the waters of the Neva, or to turn right and continue through the next enfilade to the small throne room or continue on through the Armorial Hall and Military Gallery to the Great Throne Room or Grand Church.

In 1809, the seventeenth century mansion was destroyed by fire; twenty years later, in 1829, its owners, Count Gustaf Lewenhaupt and his wife Sophie, commissioned architect Uppman and builder Jonas Jonsson to rebuild the house in the then fashionable neoclassical Empire style. Like its predecessor, the new house was built on the foundations of the previous mansion; thus, the cellars date from the 14th century and still contain a dungeon from the first castle on the site dungeon. These cellars are all that remain of the previous buildings.. The house consists of a central block of three floors, flanked by two wings of three floors. It contains informal, low-ceilinged family living accommodation on the ground floor, and a high-ceilinged piano nobile above.

The interior design of the Villa was to be as wonderful, if not more so, than the exterior. Alessandro and Giovanni Battista Maganza and Anselmo Canera were commissioned to paint frescoes in the principal salons. Among the four principal salons on the piano nobile are the West Salon (also called the Holy Room, because of the religious nature of its frescoes and ceiling), and the East Salon, which contains an allegorical life story of the first owner, Paolo Almerico, his many admirable qualities portrayed in fresco. The highlight of the interior is the central, circular hall, surrounded by a balcony and covered by the domed ceiling; it soars the full height of the main house up to the cupola, with walls decorated in trompe l'oeil.

Architect Francesco Maria Richini built the nucleus of the palazzo in the years 1642–1648 for Count Bartolomeo Arese, a member of the Arese family, one of the most influential Milanese families of the period, who became President of the Senate of Milan in 1660. Palazzo Litta thus became an important cultural centre. Grand parties held here over the years included receptions for Archduchess Mariana of Austria, for Margaret Theresa of Spain, for Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, for Maria Theresa of Austria, for Eugène de Beauharnais and for the arrival of Napoleon in Milan. Apart from its general plan, the principal features which remain essentially intact from the original seventeenth-century building are the piano nobile (although largely redecorated) and one of Richini’s courtyards.

Kozakiewicz, p287. One of the State Rooms with Jagiellonian tapestries. While the arcaded courtyard is considered a fine example of Renaissance art, it has subtle eccentricities—hints of Polish Gothic within its form, a steeply hipped and projecting roof (necessary in a northern climate) counterbalancing the soaring effect created by the uppermost arcade being higher than those below (a feature unknown in Italy) to give the courtyard a uniquely Polish renaissance look. The extra height of the uppermost arcade is truly unusual as it indicates and places the piano nobile on the third floor, whereas the rules of Italian Renaissance architecture place it on the second floor; again this indicates that while the design was inspired by Italians, the Polish artistic and cultural tradition was not extinguished in the execution.

Interiors by Germain Boffrand, created about 1735–40 and partly dismantled, are accounted among the high points of the rococo style in France (Kimball 1943: 178). They constituted the new apartments of the Prince on the ground floor and the Princesse on the piano nobile, both of which featured oval salons looking into the garden. These rooms have changed very little since the 18th century, including the Chambre du prince, Salon ovale du prince, Chambre d'apparat de la princesse and the very fine Salon ovale de la princesse with gilded carvings and mirror-glass embedded in the boiserie and ceiling canvases and overdoors by François Boucher, Charles-Joseph Natoire, and Carle Van Loo. Since a Napoleonic decree of 1808, this residence has been the property of the State.

The original part of the villa, dating to the 18th century as the vaulted entrance and the decorated ceilings of the piano nobile suggest, was built as a suburban villa near the 16th century church of Saint Anne, alongside the steep walkway (Italian: salita; Ligurian: crêuza) linking Portello to Mura delle Chiappe, midway in between the Barbarossa Walls and the 17-century New Walls, giving impulse to the urbanization of an area that used to be rural at the time. The area was called Bachernia, a phytonym indicating the presence of berries ("bacche" in Ligurian and Italian language)Corinna Praga (2016), Andar per creuse oltre il centro storico 2, Itinerari dal Portello, dal Vico della Croce Bianca e da via Balbi verso la Porta delle Chiappe, ERGA, p. 25-26, .

Girouard, p151. This meant that at Basildon, hot food "en route" to the dining room had to cross an open courtyard in all weathers, be taken through the ground floor of the mansion up the back stairs, cross the second floor and then be laid behind a colonnaded screen in the dining room before being finally served. During the modernisations at Basildon in the 1950s, Lady Iliffe had a new and state of the art kitchen installed on the piano nobile in the former bedroom allotted to former ladies of the house (12 on first floor plan). This solved the problem of hot food. The new kitchen is now open to the public as a nostalgic 1950s set museum piece, containing kitchen appliances and food stuffs and packaging contemporary to the mid 20th century.

Alienated from the Conti family in 1768–72, its return was the signal for a thorough-going restoration of its interiors in the hands of Antonio, which gave to the smaller rooms the Rococo stucco decorations of their vaulted ceilings. Passing through heiresses in the nineteenth century, the villa's lands were subdivided and it was eventually reduced to a farmhouse before being rehabilitated by a sympathetic new owner, Michele Dondi dall' Orologio. He provided the villa with its grand exterior staircase to the piano nobile and planted the surrounding parkland with specimen trees, now at full maturity. During World War I, the villa served as military command headquarters and was the site of preliminary negotiations that led to the signing of the Austrian-Italian Armistice of Villa Giusti on 11 March 1918.

From the saloon, the atmosphere of the 18th-century Grand Tour is continued throughout the remainder of the principal reception rooms of the piano nobile, though on a slightly more modest scale. The "principal apartment", or State bedroom suite, contains fine furniture and paintings as does the drawing room with its huge Venetian window; the dining room, with its gigantic apse, has a ceiling that Adam based on the Palace of Augustus in the Farnese Gardens. The theme carries on through the library, music room, down the grand staircase (not completed until 1922) onto the ground floor and into the so-called "Caesar's hall". On the departure of guests, it must sometimes have been a relief to vacate this temple of culture and retreat to the relatively simple comforts of the family pavilion.

Simplified, unscaled plan of the piano nobile at Holkham, showing the four symmetrical wings at each corner of the principal block. South is at the top of the plan. 'A' Marble Hall; 'B' The Saloon; 'C' Statue Gallery, with octagonal tribunes at each end; 'D' Dining room (the classical apse, gives access to the tortuous and discreet route by which the food reached the dining room from the distant kitchen), 'E' The South Portico; 'F' The Library in the self-contained family wing. The art collection of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, England, remains very largely that which the original owner intended the house to display; the house was designed around the art collection acquired (a few works were commissioned) by Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, during his Grand Tour of Italy during 1712–18.

The building is on three floors: The ground floor, a warren of cellars and store rooms, is low; its small windows indicating by their size the lowly status and usage of the floor, above which is the double-height banqueting hall, which falsely appears from the outside as a first-floor piano nobile with a secondary floor above. The lower windows of the hall are surmounted by alternating triangular and segmental pediments, while the upper windows are unadorned casements. Immediately beneath the entablature, which projects to emphasize the central three bays, the capitals of the pilasters are linked by swags in relief, above which the entablature is supported by dental corbel table. Under the upper frieze, festoons and masks suggest the feasting and revelry associated with the concept of a royal banqueting hall.

Mayer sold the property in 1955 to the town of Coburg which in 1956 began to operate the Schloss as a youth hostel in the DJH-Landesverband Bayern e. V. (Bavarian State Association of the German Youth Hostel Association). On 1 January 1990, the responsibility for the architectural preservation, construction and renovation of the castle, which began in 1979, was passed to the DJH- Landesverband but a part of the historic park, equipped with areas for games, sports, meadows and ponds, remained with the town. The historic equipment in the entrance's stairwell (stucco lustro) and in the Music Room (wall panels) still exist in some parts but the representative rooms of the main floor (piano nobile) still have the color combined stucco and painted ceilings as well as overdoors.

Decorative Tudor brick chimneys at Hampton Court Palace In building his palace, Wolsey was attempting to create a Renaissance cardinal's palace of a rectilinear symmetrical plan with grand apartments on a raised piano nobile, all rendered with classical detailing. The historian Jonathan Foyle has suggested that it is likely that Wolsey had been inspired by Paolo Cortese's De Cardinalatu, a manual for cardinals that included advice on palatial architecture, published in 1510. The architectural historian Sir John Summerson asserts that the palace shows "the essence of Wolsey—the plain English churchman who nevertheless made his sovereign the arbiter of Europe and who built and furnished Hampton Court to show foreign embassies that Henry VIII's chief minister knew how to live as graciously as any cardinal in Rome."Summerson, p. 14.

Holt House is one of the few remaining "suburban villas" in Washington, D.C, a design concept by the 16th-century Italian architect, Andrea Palladio. As with Holt House, many designs modeled after Palladio's consist of five parts: a central or main block, flanked by a pair of symmetrical wings, connected to the main block by narrower hyphens and end pavilions or wings. Holt House is in the "piano nobile" design style, with the upper or main floor of the house containing the formal rooms and family living quarters and the lower level or ground level usually functioning as a service area and cellar. The ground level of Holt House is thought originally to have had at least five rooms, less finely finished than the main floor and not a full story in height.

The masons Reeves of Bath were prominent in the city from the 1770s to 1860s. The Circus consists of three long, curved terraces designed by the elder John Wood to form a circular space or theatre intended for civic functions and games. The games give a clue to the design, the inspiration behind which was the Colosseum in Rome. Like the Colosseum, the three façades have a different order of architecture on each floor: Doric on the ground level, then Ionic on the piano nobile, and finishing with Corinthian on the upper floor, the style of the building thus becoming progressively more ornate as it rises. Wood never lived to see his unique example of town planning completed as he died five days after personally laying the foundation stone on 18 May 1754.

Overlooking Piazza Castello, the section built by Juvarra (illustration, right) constitutes today a scenographic façade a single bay deep, screening the rear part of the edifice, which has remained unchanged (illustration, above right). On the exterior, Juvarra expressed what was intended as a magnificent architectural preamble to an edifice that was never built, as a high-ceilinged piano nobile with arch- headed windows, which is linked to a mezzanine above it by a colossal order of pilasters of a Composite order. Each pilaster stands on a sturdy and formal fielded channel-rusticated base against the ashlar masonry of the ground floor. The central three bays are emphasised by the bolder relief offered by full columns attached to the façade, which is returned inward behind them to afford a vast glass-fronted central interior space like a glazed loggia.

The salon ceiling is graced by Pietro da Cortona's masterpiece, the Baroque fresco of the Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power. This vast panegyric allegory became highly influential in guiding decoration for palatial and church ceilings; its influence can be seen in other panoramic scenes such as the frescoed ceilings at Sant'Ignazio (by Pozzo); or those at Villa Pisani at Stra, the throne room of the Royal Palace of Madrid, and the Ca' Rezzonico in Venice (by Tiepolo). Also in the palace is a masterpiece by Andrea Sacchi, a contemporary critic of the Cortona style, Divine Wisdom. The rooms of the piano nobile have frescoed ceilings by other seventeenth-century artists like Giuseppe Passeri and Andrea Camassei, plus, in the museum collection, precious detached frescoes by Polidoro da Caravaggio and his lover Maturino da Firenze.

Westover Plantation - Georgian country house on a James River plantation in Virginia Versions of revived Palladian architecture dominated English country house architecture. Houses were increasingly placed in grand landscaped settings, and large houses were generally made wide and relatively shallow, largely to look more impressive from a distance. The height was usually highest in the centre, and the Baroque emphasis on corner pavilions often found on the continent generally avoided. In grand houses, an entrance hall led to steps up to a piano nobile or mezzanine floor where the main reception rooms were. Typically the basement area or "rustic", with kitchens, offices and service areas, as well as male guests with muddy boots,Musson, 31; Jenkins (2003), xiv came some way above ground, and was lit by windows that were high on the inside, but just above ground level outside.

Raimondo and Simone were mainly responsible for patronizing the construction of the palace, and the decoration of the piano nobile. Such decoration began in 1707 with paintings by Carlo Antonio Rambaldi, and quadratura by Antonio Dardani. Abbott Filippo is said to have been instrumental in deciding on the choice of the subjects and iconography for painting, including the ceiling depicting the Marriage of Ariadne and Bacchus (by Michelangelo Ricciolini and his son Niccolo) with vaults the hall decorated with a dozen rococo canvas paintings (1710-1715) on episodes from the Aeneid, painted by among the most prominent Italian artists of the time. Today the palace accommodates the "Musei Civici di Palazzo Buonaccorsi" including a pinacoteca (painting gallery spanning works from the medieval period to modern times, and houses a carriage museum (Museo della Carrozza), as well as a library (biblioteca "Amedeo Ricci").

Designed by Trowbridge & Livingston, the building was so well known as the headquarters of J.P. Morgan & Co.—the "House of Morgan"—that it was deemed unnecessary to mark the exterior with the Morgan name."23 Wall Street", Time Magazine (September 24, 1923); accessed March 15, 2010. The building is known for its classical architecture and formerly for its well-appointed interior, including a massive crystal chandelier and English oak paneling, but, overall, is more notable for its history than its architecture. Even though property prices in the area were very high, the Morgan building was purposely designed to be only four stories tall; the contrast to the surrounding high-rises is reinforced by the astylar exterior, rendered as a single high piano nobile over a low basement, with a mezzanine above, and an attic story above the main cornice.

Barbo, Pope Paul II. The tower of Palazzo Venezia rises above the pines in Piazza Venezia, from the terrace on the Victor Emmanuel II Monument. The dome on the left corresponds to the neighboring Church of the Gesù. It took on a new layout in 1451, when owned by Cardinal Pietro Barbo, nephew of Pope Eugenius IV and the future Pope Paul II. It was a fortified building, composed of a half-basement and a mezzanine that functioned as a piano nobile, extending over a small area between the basilica and the gate of the present palazzo overlooking the piazza, with a small external tower. It was a building of no exceptional size but was sufficiently dignified as a cardinal's residence so that, even in 1455, Pietro Barbo could proudly boast of it, having a commemorative medal struck in its honor.

Thus a great town house, by its large size and design, accentuated its owner's power by its contrast with the monotony of the smaller terraced houses surrounding it.Tait A. A. ‘Adam, Robert (1728–1792)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2009 accessed 4 Oct 2010 At Devonshire House, Kent's exterior stairs led up to a piano nobile, where the entrance hall was the only room that rose through two storeys.The great height of the grander saloons pictured in The Illustrated London News was effected in the extensive restructuring under Decimus Burton by taking into the public spaces former upstairs accommodations, making of Devonshire House even more a site purely for public receptions and gallery display. Inconspicuous pairs of staircases are tucked into modest sites at either side, for the upstairs was strictly private.

The prominent chimneys and dormers, and the rusticated basement, are more French in inspiration, while the equal proportions of the storeys were an innovation, compared to the Palladian manner of emphasising a piano nobile, or principal floor.[4] The south and west sides of Kingston Lacy, as remodelled by Sir Charles Barry in the 19th century Between 1663 and 1665, Pratt was engaged on houses for Sir Ralph Bankes, at Kingston Lacy, Dorset, (1663–5; altered 1835–41) and for William Alington, 3rd Baron Alington, at Horseheath Hall, Cambridgeshire (1663–5; dem. 1792). Refining his ideas and correcting the problem Coleshill’s corridors caused with accidental contact between family, visitors and servants, a complication addressed by many seventeenth century architects, Pratt adapted his plans. Both Kingston Lacy and Horseheath Hall had tripartite plans with a central two-storey hall.

These, however, were on 2 February 1976 destroyed by fire and the other rooms of the residence suffered smoke and water damage. The Department of Public Works and Government Services Canada (which oversees the infrastructure of the Citadelle) restored the original wing and new state rooms were built in place of the lost post-1872 additions, the work being completed in 1984. This new wing was built at the east end of and at a slight angle to the 1831 structure, the roof being copper and the exterior walls of the same masonry as the adjacent buildings, but, using more regulated block sizes and a flatter relief of pilasters and windows, as well as less detailing overall. The wing contains a separate entrance and ceremonial foyer with twin spiral staircases ascending to a piano nobile; the stairs have wood handrails with aluminum pickets and between them is a niche for sculpture.

The ground and first floors are both low, the first being rusticated, the next two floors the piano nobile and the secondo piano, have tall segmented windows separated by pilasters, the tall windows are fenced by balustraded balconettes. The fifth floor is a low mezzanine beneath the projecting hipped roof, here the small oval windows are divided by the heraldic eagles of the Labia family. The facade on the Campo San Geremia designed by Tremignon which hints at the more floral Venetian Gothic style contrasts to the more classical canal facades. However the Venetian Gothic is more of a subtle suggestion than defining style, the typical central recessed loggias of the piano nobili, typical features of the Venetian Gothic, are however glazed, and the roof line, unlike on the water fronts, is concealed by classical balustrading, but the repetition and placing of the fenestration continues the theme of the canal facades.

Small staircases led to convenient points in a complex labyrinth of narrow passages on the piano nobile above, allowing servants to enter reception rooms when required, without being seen in other parts of the house. King Ludwig II of Bavaria in his castles of Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee, built during the same period as the Palais Strousberg took the invisibility of his servants one step further by having designed dining room tables which were lowered through the floor to the kitchens below to be replenished between courses, negating the need for a servant's immediate presence completely. However, while the Palais Strousberg's layout of its servants' quarters was common throughout the capital cities of Europe, King Ludwig's seem to have been more an eccentricity peculiar to him. Such mechanisms had been used in 18th century "Hermitages"--small dining pavilions separate from the main house--in the Russian Empire.

Tapestry in Presidential Hall with Roman armor and weapons Tapestry in Presidential Hall with modern armor and weapons The interior uses fine marbles from across Italy, including green serpentine marble of the Alps, fish-veined marble, white Carrara marble, red Levanto marble, pink Castelpoggio marble, and the multicolored-veined Arni marble. The main salon is ten meters high, and illuminated through a glass mosaic curtain, which derives light through alabaster slabs. In this hall, known as the presidential hall, are hung four tapestries that including ominous depictions ancient and modern militaristic themes, including two facing works, one depicting ancient Roman armor, fasces, and eagle standards, and the other, a collection of modern armaments. The stucco decorations on the piano nobile (first floor) depict an episode of the siege of Florence, designed by Mario Moschi, and the construction of the dome by Brunelleschi, designed by Giannetto Mannucci.

After their major renovations in 1847-48, the palace — complete with piano nobile, concert hall, Van Loo paintings, and palace church — acquired a dazzling Rococo appearance. When the son of Princess Elena Pavlovna, Prince Konstantin Esperovich Beloselsky Belozersky gained his majority he inherited the palace and lived there with his wife (née Nadezhda Dimitrievna Skobeleva) and their many children. More often living at their estate on Krestovsky Island (Krestovsky Ostrov), where they had renovated a grand manorial home to a small palace and where they could enjoy country living inside of St. Petersburg and as the vast Beloselsky Belozersky Palace was a huge drain on the family resources, they decided to sell their Nevsky Prospect palace. The palace was put up for sale around the time of the engagement of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia to Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and the Rhine in 1883.

Pietro Corcos Boncompagni (1592–1664) was a member of the branch of the historic Jewish Roman family that embraced Christianity, in the person of Solomon Corcos, who in being baptised in 1582 added the family name of Pope Gregory XIII (Ugo Buoncompagni) to his own. In 1635-38 his heir Pietro Corcos BoncampagniBruce Boucher, Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova (Yale University Press) 2001:47. commissioned from Alessandro Algardi a colossal statue of Philip Neri with kneeling angels, completed in 1640 for the sacristy of Santa Maria in Vallicella, the church of the Oratorians in Rome. From the 1640s he enlarged and rebuilt the Palazzo Boncompagni Corcos in via del Governo Vecchio on the little hill in Rome called Monte Giordano, providing it with an elegantly balanced façade and transforming the interior with a courtyard, a grand staircase and a suite of reception rooms on the piano nobile.

When the Medici were made Grand Dukes of Tuscany, however, the centre of power shifted to their new residence in Palazzo Pitti, and the old centre of power began to be referred to as the Palazzo Vecchio. Shops on the ground floor and flats at the top of a modern palazzo are not at all incongruous: historically, the ground floors of even a great family's palazzo could be trade and domestic offices often open to servants, tradesmen, customers and the public, while the smartest and most prestigious floor (known as the piano nobile) was kept for the family along with the upper floors and apartments, all of which were considered cleaner and safer than those on the ground floor. There were (and are) often separate, sometimes external, stairs to the humblest attic rooms and roofs used by the staff. The most important royal palazzi in Italy are those in Caserta, Naples, Palermo, Turin, as well as the Quirinale Palace in Rome.

Facade of Sant'Andrea, Mantua One of the earliest uses of this feature in the Renaissance was at the Basilica of Sant'Andrea, Mantua, designed by Leon Battista Alberti and begun in 1472; this adapted the Roman triumphal arch to a church facade. From designs by Raphael for his own palazzo in Rome on an island block it seems that all facades were to have a giant order of pilasters rising at least two stories to the full height of the piano nobile, "a grandiloquent feature unprecedented in private palace design". He appears to have made these in the two years before his death in 1520, which left the building unstarted. It was further developed by Michelangelo at the Palaces on the Capitoline Hill in Rome (1564-68), where he combined giant pilasters of Corinthian order with small Ionic columns that framed the windows of the upper story and flanked the loggia openings below.

19th-century architectural drawing and plan of the Palazzo Pitti With the garden project well in hand, Ammanati turned his attentions to creating a large courtyard immediately behind the principal façade, to link the palazzo to its new garden. This courtyard has heavy-banded channelled rustication that has been widely copied, notably for the Parisian palais of Maria de' Medici, the Luxembourg. In the principal façade Ammanati also created the finestre inginocchiate ("kneeling" windows, in reference to their imagined resemblance to a prie-dieu, a device of Michelangelo's), replacing the entrance bays at each end. During the years 1558–70, Ammanati created a monumental staircase to lead with more pomp to the piano nobile, and he extended the wings on the garden front that embraced a courtyard excavated into the steeply sloping hillside at the same level as the piazza in front, from which it was visible through the central arch of the basement.

The central block and the end pavilions are articulated at piano nobile level with unfluted Corinthian pilasters over tall which becomes a hexastyle portico supporting a pediment in the middle of the facade, there is a minor order of 48 Ionic columns over high that runs the length of the facade. The portico fronts a loggia that contains the doorway to the Marble Saloon, this is flanked by large niches that used to contain ancient Roman statues, between the columns of the portico used to be the marble sculpture of Vertumnus and Pomona by Laurent Delvaux now in the V&A.; Above the niches is a large frieze on a Bacchic theme, this is based on an engraving in James Stuart's and Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens of the frieze on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. There is a flight of thirty three steps the full width of the portico which descends to the South Lawn.

Original plans indicate that the sub-floor contained a generous L-shaped dining room, kitchen, scullery, pantry and servant's room; the piano nobile contained a drawing room and library (connected by folding doors) over the dining room, a boudoir and two bedrooms on the east side of the hall, and a main staircase off the vestibule to the west; and the upper floor accommodated 5 bedrooms and a bathroom. The three floor plans virtually replicated each other, and included a generous hall, wide, running centrally north-south on each level. Initially, verandahs across the whole of the southern and western elevations were intended, but only sections of these appear to have been built. In September 1888, Stombuco took out a mortgage of on Sans Souci from the Queensland Investment and Land Mortgage Company Ltd, of which Sir Arthur Hunter Palmer, Premier of Queensland from May 1870 to January 1874, was a director and principal shareholder.

Portrait of Giacomo Filippo Turrini Based on the prolific and masterful frescoes by the Carracci in Bologna, Annibale was recommended by the Duke of Parma, Ranuccio I Farnese, to his brother, the Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, who wished to decorate the piano nobile of the cavernous Roman Palazzo Farnese. In November–December 1595, Annibale and Agostino traveled to Rome to begin decorating the Camerino with stories of Hercules, appropriate since the room housed the famous Greco-Roman antique sculpture of the hypermuscular Farnese Hercules. Annibale meanwhile developed hundreds of preparatory sketches for the major work, wherein he led a team painting frescoes on the ceiling of the grand salon with the secular quadri riportati of The Loves of the Gods, or as the biographer Giovanni Bellori described it, Human Love governed by Celestial Love. Although the ceiling is riotously rich in illusionistic elements, the narratives are framed in the restrained classicism of High Renaissance decoration, drawing inspiration from, yet more immediate and intimate, than Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling as well as Raphael's Vatican Logge and Villa Farnesina frescoes.

Palais Ludwig Ferdinand, seen from Wittelsbacherplatz East façade of the palace, facing Odeonsplatz The Palais Ludwig Ferdinand (also called the Alfons Palais and the Siemens Palais) is an early 19th-century palace in Munich, Germany, designed by Leo von Klenze. It is located on the Wittelsbacherplatz (at number 4) but forms part of an ensemble with the buildings on the west side of the Odeonsplatz. It was Klenze's own residence, then belonged to Princes Alfons and Ludwig Ferdinand of Bavaria. It is now the headquarters of Siemens. The palace was built in 1825-26 for Karl Anton Vogel, a manufacturer of gold and silver thread, to a plan by Franz Xaver Widmann and with façades by Leo von Klenze, who lived on the piano nobile for 25 years."13. Ludwig- Ferdinand-Palais, Wittelsbacherplatz 4, 1825/26", Michael Hardi, Leo-von- Klenze-Pfad: ein Rundgang durch die Münchner Innenstadt, 2nd ed. Munich: Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, 2009, , pdf p. 23 Klenze had originally intended the site for the first Protestant church in Munich, but that was later built elsewhere by Johann Nepomuk Pertsch.Markus Springer, "Die verpasste Klenze-Chance" , Sonntagsblatt, 24 August 2008 Michael Petzet, ed.

The palace we see today was created from two buildings separated by the alley known as Do Rode (Due Ruote), probably in 1566, following upon a request by Vincenzo Pojana to the town of Vicenza in 1561. The attribution to Palladio is founded neither on documentary evidence nor on autograph drawings, but rather on the evidence of the architectural quality of the articulation of the piano nobile, with its order which embraces two whole floors, not to mention the design of various details, like the very elegant and fleshy Composite capitals and the entablature. However, elements such as the pilasters devoid of entasis (that is, the characteristic swelling which culminates at a third of the shaft’s height) conform so little with Palladio’s vocabulary in the 1560s, that one may hypothesize that the design of the left-hand portion of the palace was the product of a youthful project by Palladio, only later extended to include the neighbouring building during the 1560s, when Pojana decided to enlarge his own residence. This would also explain the differences in the configuration of the basement zone between the two halves of the building.