I 
D 
FLORENTINE VILLAS 
A . • :-f 
F OR centuries Florence has been celebrated for 
her villa-clad hills. According to an old chron- 
icler, the country houses were more splendid 
than those in the town, and stood so close-set among 
their olive-orchards and vineyards that the traveller 
“thought himself in Florence three leagues before 
reaching the city.” 
Many of these houses still survive, strongly planted 
on their broad terraces, from the fifteenth-century farm- 
house-villa, with its projecting eaves and square tower, 
to the many-windowed maison de plaisance in which 
the luxurious nobles of the seventeenth century spent 
the gambling and chocolate-drinking weeks of the vin- 
tage season. It is characteristic of Florentine thrift and 
conservatism that the greater number of these later and 
more pretentious villas are merely additions to the plain 
old buildings, while, even in the rare cases where the 
whole structure is new, the baroque exuberance which 
became fashionable in the seventeenth century is tem- 
pered by a restraint and severity peculiarly Tuscan. 
So numerous and well preserved are the buildings 
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