40 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY 



immediately accessible by a side entrance of the house. Here the lady's favorite flowers 

 were cultivated, mainly by herself for her own pleasure; a pergola or "berceau" was 

 provided to shade a comfortable place wherein to lounge and read and escape the oppres- 

 sion of indoor air during the hot season. In my opinion, every villa garden should have 

 such a flower-garden as something apart from, though contiguous to, the residence, not 

 completely shadeless (as most flower-gardens are built today), but close to the vifla, even 

 at the expense of the kitchen-yard or the drying-ground, which, for the convenience of 

 the servants, and with very little artistic sense, are often located where they become a 

 nuisance and a real blot in the garden. 



A characteristic of almost all Tuscan villa gardens is that they are small; the main 

 part of the estate connected with the residence being the "podere" or farm, is devoted 

 entirely to the cultivation of grape vines and olives, in which Tuscan gentlemen took 

 great interest. Whenever the grounds devoted to the villa garden were more than three 

 to five acres, a part of them was treated as a park, and the fundamental principle governing 

 their treatment consisted in selecting the most prominent points of the estate whereon 

 to build something in the nature of a feature for the park grounds. Vistas, berceaux, 

 chapels, kiosks, water-basins, etc., constituted such features, and the roads and paths, 

 often completely shaded, were made to lead to these points. The Boboli gardens, which 

 furnish, perhaps, the best illustration of this point, are too well known to you to require 

 more than passing mention. A villa garden, which I fancy is not known at all, is the Villa 

 La Fortezza, of which I am sorry to possess only a few photographs. They are, however, 

 sufiicient to show the features of the estate, which form an original curiosity, for every- 

 one of them represents a monument to the memory of illustrious Tuscan men — one is 

 a "pantheon." 



A few words will suffice in reference to the Roman gardens. They have been so thoroughly 

 studied, photographed, and widely published that it would be superfluous to speak of 

 Vifla Lante, or the Vatican Gardens, Vifla d'Este, Borghese, Falconieri, and others. I 

 desire only to say that they are the most grandiose gardens in Italy, the most imposing 

 but not the most elaborate. The reason for their "magnificence" is that Roman people 

 are "magnificent" — they view life on a vaster scale and with a broader mind than the 

 rest of mortals. The grandeur of the Roman Empire, so far as architecture could express 

 it, is stifl before the eyes of the people of every class, and their eye is used to an environ- 

 ment which does not aflow of petty things. In a Roman garden one feels a sense of awe, 

 feels his very soul lifted to higher spheres in the same way as when one finds himself under 

 the superb arcades of St. Peter's, or among the ruins of the Colosseum. 



The farther south one proceeds in Italy, and about in proportion with the increase 

 of heat, one finds a gradual increase of fancy and imagination in every branch of art. The 

 Neapolitan nature is brifliant, gay, fond of display, of ornaments, or what the French, 

 with an untranslatable word, cafl "la blague." Many centuries of Spanish dominion have 

 but increased a hundred-fold this natural tendency. The result of this fact in architecture 

 is a tendency to depart from the pure and simple lines, and to let the pencil of the artist 

 run more wildly over the drawing-board. I must hasten to say, however, that the splendid 

 models of architecture left all over the ex-kingdom of the Two Sicilies by the many Greek 

 settlements have done much toward keeping the fervid native imagination within 

 reasonable bounds. 



To show more clearly this idea, I beg to illustrate it with a somewhat curious example. 



