VILLA PALMIERI 



The Italian villa, which attained its full development in the vicinity oi 

 Rome during the sixteenth century, did not make the same rapid 

 progress further north, and many of the villas in the neighbourhood of 

 Florence retain even to the present day their semi-farmhouse character- 

 istics. 



Although the country house was often enlarged, or rebuilt in a more 

 palatial style, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the gardens 

 not infrequently were laid out on the most modest scale. The Villa 

 Palmieri is no exception to the rule. The casino, or palazzo as it 

 might be called, though retaining the simpler lines of the Tuscan 

 house, is a fairly large building, and the house terrace, with its statues 

 and grand staircase, is on a proportionate scale with it, and would lead 

 you to anticipate a garden as large, say, as the Villa Medici in Rome ; 

 but what you find is an oval parterre, some seventy paces long by forty 

 broad, overlooking the podere. This appears to have been the whole 

 garden, which was doubtless supplemented by pergolas or berceaux 

 leading into the cultivated ground, and terminating in groups of cypress 

 or stone pine, or an ilex grove with seats set about some sylvan god. 



The villa, then known as Schifanoja, came into the hands of Matteo 

 Palmieri, an able scholar and friend of Cosmo de' Medici, about the 

 year 1450 ; but it was not until 1670 that Palmiero Palmieri, a descendant 

 of his, built the present palace (or the greater part of it) and called it after 

 his dwn name. 



The palace with its wide overhanging eaves is a simple, dignified? 

 building of good proportions, arranged round a central arcaded cortile^ and 



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