Ill 
ROMAN VILLAS 
I N studying the villas near the smaller Italian towns, 
it is difficult to learn much of their history. Now 
and then some information may be gleaned from 
a local guide-book, but the facts are usually meagre or 
inaccurate, and the name of the architect, the date of the 
building, the original plan of the garden, have often alike 
been forgotten. 
With regard to the villas in and about Rome, the case 
is different. Here the student is overwhelmed by a 
profusion of documents. Illustrious architects dispute 
the honour of having built the famous pleasure-houses 
on the seven hills, and historians of art, from Vasari 
downward, have recorded their annals. Falda engraved 
them in the seventeenth century, and Percier and Fon- 
taine at the beginning of the nineteenth ; and they have 
been visited and described, at various periods, by count- 
less travellers from different countries. 
One of the earliest Roman gardens of which a descrip- 
tion has been preserved is that which Bramante laid out 
within the Vatican in the last years of the fifteenth 
century. This terraced garden, with its monumental 
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