VILLAS NEAR ROME 
innumerable retainers, it is easy to understand why 
the Villa d’Este had to be expanded out of all likeness 
to an ordinary country house. 
The plan is ingenious and interesting. From the vil- 
lage square only a high blank wall is visible. Through 
a door in this wall one passes into a frescoed corridor 
which leads to a court enclosed in an open arcade, with 
fountains in rusticated niches. From a corner of the 
court a fine intramural stairway descends to what is, on 
the garden side, the piano nobile of the villa. On this 
side, looking over the gardens, is a long enfilade of 
rooms, gaily frescoed by the Zuccheri and their school; 
and behind the rooms runs a vaulted corridor built 
against the side of the hill, and lighted by bull’s-eyes in 
its roof. This corridor has lost its frescoes, but preserves 
a line of niches decorated in coloured pebbles and stucco- 
work, with gaily painted stucco caryatids supporting the 
arches ; and as each niche contains a semicircular foun- 
tain, the whole length of the corridor must once have 
rippled with running water. 
The central room opens on the great two-storied por- 
tico or loggia, whence one descends by an outer stair- 
way to a terrace running the length of the building, and 
terminated at one end by an ornamental wall, at the 
other by an open loggia overlooking the Campagna. 
From this upper terrace, with its dense wall of box and 
laurel, one looks down on the towering cypresses and 
ilexes of the lower gardens. The grounds are not large, 
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