2IO 



THE GARDENS OF ITALY. 



have attended his master when he came to Tivoli to escape the heat of Rome. When Pope 

 Gregory visited Cardinal Luigi these bare walls were brave with green and crimson velvet, and 

 the Pope's bed was hung with velvet curtains embroidered with seed pearls which had belonged 

 to Henry II of France. E. M P 



Although our imagination boggles at the vast cost of the great Renaissance villas of Tivoli 

 and Frascati, one can imagine one of those cardinal builders showing his guests over his works 

 in progress, and concluding with the deprecatory remark : " This is a mere nothing, as you will 

 see when I drive you over to the Villa of Hadrian. A poor cardinal cannot pretend to rival 



the undisputed master of 

 the world." Of all the 

 building emperors 

 Hadrian would seem to 

 have been one of the 

 most capricious. 



We do not know 

 enough about Nero's 

 golden house to establish 

 a comparison, but 

 Diocletian's fortress 

 palace of Spalatro is a 

 reasonable and practical 

 dwelling compared with 

 Hadrian's Villa, which 

 seems like some modern 

 exhibition city, Roman 

 only in its permanence. 

 Hadrian's Villa to-dav, 



' 



besides being a lovely 

 park in the plains below 

 the mountains of Tivoli, studded with cypresses, oaks, olive trees and dense thickets where the 

 nightingales love to sing, is also a remarkable school of building construction (Figs. 219 and 220). 

 It was probably begun in 125 A.D., and carried on for thirteen years up to Hadrian's death in 138 A.D. 

 The epoch of Hadrian seems to have been one in which Roman brick-faced concrete reached its 

 greatest development. The soundness of the method is shown by survivals through far worse 

 ravages than those of some two thousand years of time. Every age has pillaged these remains, from 

 Constantine to modern times, and Tivoli must be largely built out of its spoils. The excellence 

 of the facework of small squares of tufa stone set diagonally, opus reticulatum, bonded by 

 bands of the famous thin, flat Roman bricks, which resemble our paving tiles, might lead the 

 spectator to suppose that he sees the finished face of the walls. It is clear, however, that all 

 was hidden by marble casing and plasterwork. The diagonal disposition of the material must 

 have commended itself to the practical minds of the Romans by the ease with which the facing 

 could be placed in position ready for the filling in of the rubble concrete behind. The inlaid 

 marble floors, where they exist in patches recently excavated, are gorgeous, and many marble 

 fragments of columns, cornices, etc., remain to prove a high standard of architectural detail. 

 The great vaults seem in many cases to have been lined with white, and probably also 

 with colour mosaic. The cubes are oblongs of white marble, so as to have a tooth-like 

 hold into their matrix. 



It is well-nigh impossible to ravel out the tangled skein of buildings which cover about one 

 hundred and sixty acres of the present park-like grounds. In a general way we know that the 

 Imperial idea was that of a souvenir in miniature of the great buildings of the Roman World which 

 Hadrian had seen in his far-spread travels. The very variety of the restorations made on paper 

 illustrates the complexity of the problem, while even the names assigned to the various 

 structures differ. It is clear that one interesting block is a miniature of the great Imperial 



220. HEMICYCLE OF THE IMPERIAL PALACE AT THE VILLA HADRIANA, 



TIVOLI. 



