The fifth edition of the Venetian Villas Days (Giornate delle Ville Venete) was launched in Venice, introducing a new ‘Landscape‘ experiential cluster and focusing on communication, attention and the growing potential of Venetian Villas as destinations for undertourism.

Venice, the symbolic city of the civilisation of the Venetian Villa and the starting point of the historic relationship between the Serenissima Republic and its rural hinterland, hosted the launch of the fifth edition of the Venetian Villas Days, taking place on 17 and 18 October 2026.

The event was presented on 16 September at Palazzo Zeno, the historic Venetian residence in the San Polo district. The conference ‘Algoritmo Villa Veneta – La salienza della Villa Veneta come cura per il nostro tempo’ (The Venetian Villa Algorithm – The Significance of the Venetian Villa as a Remedy for Our Time) brought together villa owners, cultural professionals and communication experts to reflect on how this heritage can be conveyed without reducing it to a picturesque image of the past.

At the heart of the discussion was a change of perspective: from appearance to substance, from distraction to attention. In an age dominated by rapidly circulating digital images, the challenge is not simply to make historic villas more visible, but to encourage visitors to look more closely at the places, stories, landscapes and communities behind the image.

Among the speakers were Amerigo Restucci, President of the Istituto Regionale Ville Venete, and Isabella Collalto de Cröy, President of the Associazione per le Ville Venete APS. They were joined by Nicolò Zeno, owner of Palazzo Zeno, together with Giorgia Menditto, Andrea Bettini, Sabrine El Mayel and Guido Damini, with Luana Vollero as moderator. Their contributions explored heritage, education, storytelling, art, history and contemporary communication.

For Isabella Collalto, the owners of Venetian Villas are custodians of a collective identity that can be shared with an increasingly attentive audience interested in experiential tourism and in discovering destinations beyond the most crowded routes. This perspective connects directly with undertourism, encouraging visitors to explore lesser-known places and helping to distribute tourism flows across a wider territory.

A major new feature of the 2026 edition is the introduction of the “Landscape” experiential cluster, alongside Heritage, Green, Wine & Food, Family, Wellbeing, Dream and Life at the Villa. It highlights a fundamental characteristic of the Venetian Villa: the landscape is not a backdrop to the architecture, but an integral part of the Villa itself. Gardens, parks, tree-lined avenues, agricultural land and cultivated landscapes form a system inseparable from the architecture and its historical and productive role. Experiences include a botanical illustration workshop at Ca’ Zenobia and a cultural trail through the parks of Villa Fogazzaro-Colbachini, Castello Grimani-Sorlini and the Monastero di San Marco.

The theme of undertourism will continue through the Venetian Villas Days presentation road tour, with a first stop in Assisi, 24–25 September 2026, for the WTE – World Tourism Event, in the context of celebrations marking the 800th anniversary of the death of St Francis of Assisi. The initiative will be promoted alongside the Veneto Region, before continuing to the TTG Travel Experience in Rimini on 14 October, with the presentation “Venetian Villas: Identity, Undertourism and AI”.

Expanding on the Venetian Villa Algorithm, these events will focus on landscape, digital innovation and communication. The underlying idea is expressed in the event’s evocative payoff: “You cannot know Venice if you do not know the Venetian Villas.” The Villas, as architectural testimony to the extraordinary civilisation developed around the Serenissima, become a way of discovering the wider territory beyond Venice and its most established tourist routes.

The scale of this heritage is considerable: the Istituto Regionale Ville Venete has catalogued 4,243 villas, including 3,807 in Veneto and 436 in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. More than 75 participating villas have created over 130 experiences for 2026. Previous editions attracted more than 75,000 participants, with the ambition of exceeding this figure.

The Venetian Villas Days thus offers a different way of discovering the territory: slower, more experiential and attentive to the connections between heritage, landscape and community. Moving from appearance to substance means looking beyond the postcard; moving from distraction to attention means rediscovering the living landscape of which the Venetian Villa remains an integral part.