ITALIAN VILLAS 
long ilex-walk connecting the villa with the bosco, 
exemplifies the Italian habit of providing shady access 
from the house to the wood. Dussieux, at any rate, 
paid Le Notre no compliment in attributing to him the 
plan of the Villa Albani ; for the great French artist 
contrived to put more poetry into the flat horizons of 
Vaux and Versailles than Nolli has won from the famous 
view of the Campagna which is said to have governed 
the planning of the Villa Albani. 
The grounds are laid out in formal quincunxes of 
clipped ilex, but before the house lies a vast sunken 
garden enclosed in terraces. The farther end of the 
garden is terminated by a semicircular portico called the 
Caffe , built later than the house, under the direction of 
Winckelmann ; and in this structure, and in the archi- 
tecture of the terraces, one sees the heavy touch of that 
neo-Grecianism which was to crush the life out of 
eighteenth-century art. The gardens of the Villa Albani 
seem to have been decorated by an archaeologist rather 
than an artist. It is interesting to note that antique 
sculpture, when boldly combined with a living art, is 
one of the most valuable adjuncts of the Italian garden ; 
whereas, set in an artificial evocation of its own past, it 
loses all its vitality and becomes as lifeless as its back- 
ground. 
One of the most charming of the smaller Roman villas 
lies outside the Porta Salaria, a mile or two beyond the 
Villa Albani. This is the country-seat of Prince Don 
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