Like most Venetian villas, inside its property Villa Pastori has a chapel that is still consecrated today.
In fact, we must not forget that, even though the Villas were built for use as summer residencies, they were also the social center of a large estate (which in our case was over 80 hectares) and therefore needed structures suitable for management and assistance of a large number of people, relatives, servants of the Villa and the employees working the land and caring for the animals.
Since there was no church in the area between the end of the 18th and the middle of the 19th century, the small chapel of Villa Pastori served as a place of worship for the inhabitants of the countryside. A priest came from the nearest parish to celebrate the rite: weddings, baptisms, and Sunday Mass.
Even now a Mass is celebrated once a year to commemorate the dead of the family.
The structure of the Chapel
The shape of the central hall is octagonal, in place of two sides we find the portal and in front of it the triumphal arch through which we access the presbytery or rather the room where the eighteenth-century altar is in polychrome marble .
The eight walls (in two of which there are two pretty niches) continue upwards. During the restoration of the roof a complex system of tie rods was found, which support the vault from above, connected to the load-bearing beams of the roof.
Valuable are the tabernacle, the reliquary and the grates beside the altar, used in the past as confessionals. In fact, a room behind the altar housed a small sacristy, no longer in existence, in which the priest listened to the faithful from behind the gratings.
Also interesting are the remaining squares of a nineteenth-century Via Crucis.
The floor of the Chapel is the result of the first restoration of the Villa after the purchase by the Pastori. It was built according to the methodology of the “Venetian terrace”, small fragments of marble immersed in a binder such as cement, lime or cocciopesto. A central insert remains visible with references to the year of restoration (1860) and the names of the owners.
The chapel should be dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi.