SIENESE VILLAS 
near the famous monastery of the Osservanza, lies an- 
other villa of much more modest dimensions, with 
grounds which, though in some respects typically 
Sienese, are in one way unique in Italy. This is La 
Palazzina, the estate of the De’ Gori family. The small 
seventeenth-century house, with its adjoining chapel 
and outbuildings, lies directly on the public road, and 
forms the boundary of its own grounds. The charm- 
ing garden-facade, with its voluted sky-line, and the 
two-storied open loggia forming the central motive 
of the elevation, faces on a terrace-like open space, 
bounded by a wall, and now irregularly planted d 
r Anglaise, but doubtless once the site of the old 
flower-garden. Before the house stands an old well 
with a beautiful wrought-iron railing, and on the axis 
of the central loggia a gate opens into one of the 
pleached ilex-alleys which are the glory of the Palaz- 
zina. This ancient tunnel of gnarled and interlocked 
trees, where a green twilight reigns in the hottest sum- 
mer noon, extends for several hundred feet along a 
ridge of ground ending in a sort of circular knoll or 
platform, surrounded by an impenetrable wall of square- 
clipped ilexes. The platform has in its centre a round 
clearing, from which four narrow paths radiate at right 
angles, one abutting on the pleached walk, the others 
on the outer ilex-wall. Between these paths are four 
small circular spaces planted with stunted ilexes and 
cypresses, which are cut down to the height of shrubs. 
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