Villa Querini Stampalia, Montanari, Taccoli, known as “Persa”

The origin of a large-scale rustico fund, called "Gazzo", in Pressana, is witnessed since the third decade of the eleventh century; it extended between the ancient via Porciliana and the river Fratta and the buildings that stood there were part of the "Mansio Jerosolimitana", a reception facility built by Benedictine monks to accommodate knights and pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land, then managed by the Order of Saint John of Rhodes. In 1031 the emperor Conrad II gave the property to the bishop of Verona, who in turn granted it to the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. The original function of the complex ceased in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the Venetian nobleman Francesco Querini, who became a tenant in 1460, made it his country residence. It was in the following century that Nicolò started his transformation into a sumptuous house, calling some artists and workers engaged, in the same years, in the realization of the chapel of San Biagio, near the church of the convent of Saints Nazario and Celso in Verona; Among these, Giovanni Maria Falconetto, author of the fresco of the Madonna with Child in the adjacent oratory that, by the middle of the 16th century, still belonged to the same Veronese convent. In 1501 the entrance arch was also built, placed at the opposite front of the medieval access and adorned with a sequence of pinnacles; the space in front of the villa became a large barn, used for agricultural activities. The factory, with the barchessa and the oratory, is one of the oldest examples of agricultural estate of Venetian property on the mainland, whose changes in use over the centuries are still recognizable in the presence of different architectural elements, as the sixteenth-century double-order loggia with stone columns of the rear façade and the crowning battlements.