FLORENTINE VILLAS 
of Zocchi, the eighteenth-century engraver, a semicir- 
cular space enclosed in a low wall once extended be- 
tween the house and the road, as at the neighbouring 
Villa Corsini and at Poggio Imperiale. It was an ad- 
mirable rule of the old Italian architects, where the 
garden-space was small and where the site permitted, 
to build their villas facing the road, so that the full ex- 
tent of the grounds was secured to the private use of 
the inmates, instead of being laid open by a public ap- 
proach to the house. This rule is still followed by 
French villa-architects, and it is exceptional in France 
to see a villa entered from its grounds when it may be 
approached directly from the highroad. 
Behind Castello the ground rises in terraces, enclosed 
in lateral walls, to a high retaining-wall at the back, 
surmounted by a wood of ilexes which contains a pool 
with an island. Montaigne, who describes but few 
gardens in his Italian diary, mentions that the terraces 
of Castello are en pant e (sic); that is, they incline gradu- 
ally toward the house, with the slope of the ground. 
This bold and unusual adaptation of formal gardening 
to the natural exigencies of the site is also seen in the 
terraced gardens of the beautiful Villa Imperiali (now 
Scassi) at Sampierdarena, near Genoa. The plan of 
the garden at Castello is admirable, but in detail it has 
been modernized at the cost of all its charm. Wide 
steps lead up to the first terrace, where II Tribolo’s 
stately fountain of bronze and marble stands surrounded 
33 
