And so to fair Verona, in the rich, industrious Italian province of Vicenza, which has a GDP higher than Greece and more architects than the whole of Ireland. What they have to show for it all, however, is another question entirely.

Local architects seem to spend most of their time designing furniture, lighting, shop fit-outs or even shoes and, of course, restoring or renovating historic buildings. In the region's utterly charming cities, there is almost no outstanding contemporary architecture.

During the RIAI's annual conference, held last weekend in Verona, we saw not a single modern building of any significance dating from the past two decades. Whatever the leading Italian architect, Renzo Piano, has been doing, it is being done elsewhere - mostly abroad these days.

The countryside has been turned into a haphazardly industrialised landscape, more shocking than anywhere in Ireland. All of the buildings appear to have been designed by hacks - Gritti e Grotti, as Nicole Sutton called them, with cladding by Luigi Loco. It is all desperate.

What has happened is that the province of Vicenza, in common with much of northern Italy, has sacrificed its flat landscapes to get rich. There is so little planning control that farmers who get bored growing maize or even vines can apparently flog their fields at will for factories.

Verona itself is famous throughout the world for its romantic associations as the mythical home of Romeo and Juliet. We were there, however, not to get misty-eyed over their doomed love, but to celebrate the work of two dead architects - Andrea Palladio and Carlo Scarpa.

The official guide to this year's conference, penned by RIAI director John Graby, bluntly declared that the celebrated marble balcony in the so-called Casa Giulietta, off Piazza Erbe, is "a fake, built in 1935" to capitalise on the global popularity of Shakespeare's tragic tale.

But the myth is so powerful that the courtyard attracts an estimated 500,000 visitors a year, including numerous star-struck lovers, and many of them have left their mark; the brick walls are covered in layers of "Harry Loves Sally"-type grafitti, like a version of Windmill Lane.

Nobody knows who was the architect of Verona's famed Roman amphitheatre, dating from the first century AD, but it remains a great wonder of the world - even though only the inner walls of the elliptical enclosure survive and just one stunning fragment of its triple-tiered perimeter.

According to our tour guide, the rest of it was toppled by an earthquake in 1117 - though, curiously, there is no mention of this in the most popular official guide. Nor does it say anything about the subsequent cannibalising of the vast arena for stone with which to rebuild the city.

Verona was "a cradle of architecture", in the words of Arthur Hickey, the RIAI president. The institute's conference there - its biggest, with an attendance of 340 - was intended to give Irish architects an opportunity to see another culture.

Martin Cullen, Minister of State at the Office of Public Works, told them that Verona's Roman arena - venue for its annual opera festival - was "as relevant in the modern era as it was then"; what he had in mind was Bertie Ahern's grand projet, Stadium Ireland at Abbotstown.

And though he might be putting himself "in conflict with the Taoiseach" by saying so, Mr Cullen offered his personal view that Dublin was "crying out" for a new approach to high-rise buildings. We should be "challenging ourselves with the skyline of the city", in his view.

It was Andrea Palladio who led the architecture of Vicenza out of the Dark Ages. Dr Edward McParland had the conference enraptured by his exposition of the great master's works and his enduring influence - felt in Ireland to this day through the rash of "neo-Palladian" houses.

Palladio made himself more famous as an architect than Michaelangelo because his ideas transformed the local into the universal; they could be applied to country houses, town palazzi, churches, public buildings, anywhere. He also produced an elaborate brochure of his work.

His Quattro Libri became a bible for succeeding generations of architects, including Edward Lovett Pearce, architect of the old Parliament House in College Green. Pearce carried it around with him and wrote notes in the margins on a two-week tour of Vicenza at the age of 25.

Bernini was also "a great fan" and, more recently, Le Corbusier ("Corbustier" in the official guide); on a tour of Italy in 1907, "he passed through Vicenza without alighting from the train" yet still recycled the plan of a Palladian villa in one of his early houses, according to Colin Rowe.

We did not see the interior of Palladio's iconic Villa Rotunda; the US-based foundation that owns this world heritage site had capriciously decided that some 250 Irish architects and their partners would not be let in, though a small party of Austrian students were admitted later.

What this extraordinary behaviour suggests is that the ownership of such important elements of the patrimonie mondiale should no longer be in private hands, but in public ownership. For some of us, it confirmed that the most familiar sign in Italy is CHIUSO (closed).

After his Grand Tour in the 1770s, Lord Charlemont had measured drawings done of the Villa Rotunda with a view to replicating its "preposterous" four porticos somewhere in Dublin, as Dr McParland said; instead, we got the Casino in Marino, designed by Sir William Chambers.

The pomposity of Palladio's rich client mars the broken pediment of the Villa Barbaro, with its overflowing cornucopia of crests, shields and symbols. It is incredible to think it was finished in 1558, more than 160 years before Palladianism arrived in Ireland. Palladio's classicism was based "on the discipline of plan, section and elevation. It had nothing to do with sticking columns on to the front of a building", said Dr McParland yet, in Ireland at least, "the greatest legacy of Palladio" is not Bellamont Forest or Russborough House but the neo-Palladian palazzi.

Sharing joint billing at the conference was Carlo Scarpa, who was virtually unknown outside Italy until after he died in 1978, some 400 years after Palladio. Since then, as Scarpa afficionado Richard Murphy told us, he has been the subject of 30 books, some by Murphy himself.

Scarpa had the genius to work creatively with the fabric of historic buildings, as shown by his brilliant deconstruction of part of Verona's 14th century Castelvecchio to make it fit for a museum. One wonders if he would get away with a similar intervention nowadays.

As a Venetian, Scarpa was obsessed with water, so he continually made use of it in pools or channels that are full to overflowing. His most celebrated creation is a concrete-enclosed, Zen garden-inspired mausoleum for a local plutocrat in Treviso.

There was nobody on hand to explain the metaphorical allusions in the Brion Monumental Tomb. Only a few who greased the palm of a caretaker were given access to the small, absolutely bare chapel and other inaccessible areas that appeared to be off limits to everyone else.

Scarpa's attention to detail is also evident in the rich facade of his 1972 extension to an earlier bank building in the centre of Verona. Would any of us have the time to climb off the treadmill to do anything of the sort these days, most of the visiting Irish architects thought.

An exhibition of Scarpa's drawings at the Castelvecchio museum includes one freehand sketch with a question mark in a small circle at the bottom of it; have I got it right? Whatever about Verona's "future in the past", that's a question they all have to answer, on a daily basis.

It was because of the area's links with the past, the impact of its villas on the landscape and its good wine that Sean O'Laoire suggested holding the RIAI conference there. We learned a lot about all three of these elements last weekend, sometimes in quite unexpected ways.