FLORENTINE VILLAS 
two-storied elevation with windows divided by a meagre 
order, and a stately central gable flanked by balustrades 
surmounted by vases. The whole treatment is inter- 
esting, as showing the manner in which the seventeenth- 
century architect overlaid a plain Tuscan structure with 
florid ornament ; and the effect, if open to criticism, is 
at once gay and stately. 
The house is built about a quadrangle enclosed in an 
open arcade on columns. Opposite the porte-cochere 
is a doorway opening on a broad space bounded by a 
balustrade with statues. An ilex avenue extends be- 
yond this space, on the axis of the doorway. At one 
end of the house is the oblong walled garden, with its 
box-edged flower-beds grouped in an intricate geomet- 
rical pattern about a central fountain. Corresponding 
with this garden, at the opposite end of the house, is a 
dense ilex-grove with an alley leading down the centre 
to a beautiful fountain, a tank surmounted by a kind of 
voluted pediment, into which the water falls from a 
large ilex-shaded tank on a higher level. Here again 
the vineyards and olive-orchards come up close to the 
formal grounds, the ilex-grove being divided from the 
podere by a line of cypresses instead of a wall. 
Not far from the Gamberaia, on the hillside of San 
Gervasio, stands another country house which preserves 
only faint traces of its old gardens, but which, architec- 
turally, is too interesting to be overlooked. This is the 
villa of Fonte all’ Erta. Originally a long building of 
5 1 
