THE GARDENS OF ITALY. 



of the Italian villa is heavily charged with the desire to re-create the past greatness of 

 Rome. The energy of creation was still, however, in its first momentum, and the antique was 

 a stimulus rather than a clog. To live as the Romans, to re-create the gardens of Lucullus, 

 Cicero and Hadrian was an ideal that produced works which live for themselves and not as mere 

 lesson books of a vanished past. Perhaps it was fortunate that the ancient writings and 

 descriptions of the Greek and Roman villas and gardens were, as they still remain even now, so 

 obscure that the restorations on paper of various learned authorities are all wildly divergent. 

 Cicero's and Pliny's villas, for instance, as usually put forward in schemes of restoration, seem 

 outside the bounds of probability and practical building politics. This absence of direct 

 examples gave free play to a skilful adaptation of ideals to actual requirements and sites. The 

 Villa Madama at the Gate of Rome, an incompleted fragment of a great idea, was a forerunner 

 of much that was afterwards attempted and in part achieved. 



The Villa Lante at Bagnaia (Chap. XIX), while a masterpiece of artistic gardening, is a 

 most modest and practicable creation for its special situation and purpose. It is difficult to 

 think of a more pleasant place in which to spend a glorious Italian afternoon. The water 

 rushing down the quaint troughs is checked by the scrolls of the masonry as in the 

 watercourses of nature. It is an artistic treatment of a naturally observed fact. The 

 music of the waters beneath the shade serves as a Lethe passage that blots out the glaring 

 memories of the dusty highway without. The balance of the broad and massive twin casinos 

 is the outcome of a fine masonic sense. They are veritable everlasting cubes of stone, 

 relieved by a fretted surface of pilaster treatment that has none of the worrying obligations of 

 an Order. The central fountain presents a modest appreciation of human form, true in scale 

 and vigorous in an attitude that stops short of the affectation of a studied pose. The island 



5. AN ITALIAN FARMYARD. 



