VILLA ALDOBRANDINI, 
FRASCATI. 
HAT strikes us most as we examine the 
sites or read descriptions of the old 
classic villas, is the lavish way. in 
which their size and arrangements are 
planned. ‘“* Bring a few more carriages,” says 
Sir Gorgius Midas to his flunkies. ‘Build a 
few more dining-rooms, another half-a-dozen foun- 
tains,’ seems to have been the order of a Lucullus 
or a Pliny. “ One loses one’s self,” says M. Gaston 
Boissier, writing of Pliny, “in the enumeration 
which he makes of his apartments. He has 
dining-rooms of various sizes for all occasions. He 
dines in this one when he is alone; the other 
serves him to receive his friends in; the third is 
the largest, and can contain the crowd of his 
invited guests. The one faces the sea, and while 
taking one’s meal one beholds the waves breaking 
against the walls ; another is buried in the grounds, 
and in it one enjoys on all sides the view of the 
fields and of the scenes of rustic lite. Nowadays 
one bed-chamber usually satisfies the most exacting ; 
it would be difficult to say how many Pliny’s 
villa contained. There are not only bedrooms 
for every want, but for every caprice. In some 
one can behold the sea from all the windows, in 
others one hears without seeing it. This room 
is in the form of an abside, and, by large openings, 
receives the sun at every hour of the day; the 
other is obscure and cool, and only lets in just so 
much light that one may not be in darkness. If 
the master desires to enliven himself, he remains 
in this open room, whence he can see all that 
passes outside; if he desires to meditate he has 
a room just suited for the purpose, where he can 
shut himself up, and which is so arranged that no 
noise ever reaches his ears. Let us add that these 
rooms are adorned with fine mosaics, are often 
covered with graceful pictures, and that they nearly 
all contain marble fountains. To com- 
plete the whole, we must imagine baths, piscenie, 
tennis courts, porticoes extending in every direction 
for the enjoyment of all the views, alleys sanded 
for walks, and for those who chose to ride on 
horseback, a large hippodrome, formed of a long 
alley, straight and sombre, shaded by plane trees 
and laurels, while on all sides curved alleys wind, 
which cross and cut each other so as to render 
( 
the space greater and the programme more varied.” 
The pictures of gardens in the old houses of Rome 
and Pompeii have these alleys shut in by walls 
of hornbeam, with a round’ space in the middle 
where swans swim in a basin, and little arbours 
here and there with a marble statue or a column, 
and seats placed at intervals. 
The delight in extent, the large ideas, the 
lavish conceptions of the ancients, awoke again in 
their prototype, the villa-builders of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. The quoted description 
might serve for that queen of villas, the Aldobran- 
dini at Frascati. It is true that the power to 
extend in directions almost unlimited had declined, 
but the halls opening in all directions, the cool 
porticoes, the covered ways, the wealth of falling 
water, leave us with the feeling of splendid 
expenditure in plan and execution. 
The villa, which stands grandly on a succession 
of ample terraces falling to a long slope, was 
designed by the Lombard, Giacomo della Porta, 
and was begun in 1603, for Cardinal Pietro 
Aldobrandini, nephew of Clement VIII. Its chiet 
entrance is intended to be from the piazza of the 
town below, from which it is divided by a wrought- 
iron balustrade of remarkably bold and fine design, 
and the artist evidently planned that the visitor 
should mount up with the coup d’eil of the great 
house always before his eyes, meeting with one 
surprise after another as the landscape unfolded. 
Nowadays the great gates are never opened, and 
a little side door up a lane forms the very 
inadequate substitute. The Cardinal had just 
received the substantial addition to his income of the 
revenues of Ferrara, which, as a Latin inscription on 
the facade of the palace commemorates, at this time 
submitted to the pontifical dominion, and for his 
new country seat he certainly secured the master- 
piece of the great follower of Vignola. It was 
his last work, too, for, driving back to Rome with 
the Cardinal one summer’s evening, after having 
eaten too plentifully of melons and ices, Giaccmo 
was taken so ill that he had to be left at the 
convent at San Giovanni Laterano, where he died 
that night. The work was completed by Fontana, 
but we see in it all the majestic yet exuberant 
feeling for decoration peculiar to the Lombard 
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