Ifntrofcuction 



"Nothing has interested me more in these 

 Roman villas than their former masters. As 

 naturalists are aware, one obtains a pretty good 

 idea of an animal from his shell. 



" The place where I began to comprehend him 

 is the Villa Albani, erected in the eighteenth 

 century for Cardinal Alexander Albani, and ac- 

 cording to his own plans. What you at once 

 detect here is the grand seigneur courtier after 

 the fashion of our nobles of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury. There are differences, but the two tastes 

 are kindred. What they prize above all things 

 is art and artistic order ; nothing is left to na- 

 ture ; all is artificial. Water flows only in jets 

 and in sprays, and has no other bed but basins 

 and urns. Grass-plots are enclosed within 

 enormous box-hedges higher than a man's 

 head and thick as walls, and are shaped in geo- 

 metric triangles, the points of which terminate 

 in a centre. In front stretches a dense palisade 

 lined with small cypresses. You ascend from 

 one garden to another by broad stone steps 

 similar to those at Versailles. Flower beds are 

 enclosed in little frames of box and form de- 



