ITALIAN VILLAS 
and perhaps suggested by the miniature “ Valley of 
Canopus ” in the neighbouring Villa of Hadrian ; and 
there are endless complications of detail, where the 
earlier masters would have felt the need of breadth and 
simplicity. Above all, there is a want of harmony be- 
tween the landscape and its treatment. The baroque 
garden-architecture of Italy is not without charm, and 
even a touch of the grotesque has its attraction in the 
flat gardens of Lombardy or the sunny Euganeans; 
but the cypress- groves of the Villa d’Este are too 
solemn, and the Roman landscape is too august, to 
suffer the nearness of the trivial. 
Ill 
FRASCATI 
The most famous group of villas in the Roman 
country-side lies on the hill above Frascati. Here, 
in the middle of the sixteenth century, Flaminio Pon- 
zio built the palace of Mondragone for Cardinal 
Scipione Borghese . 1 Aloft among hanging ilex-woods 
rises the mighty pile on its projecting basement. This 
fortress-like ground floor, with high-placed grated win- 
dows, is common to all the earlier villas on the brig- 
and-haunted slopes of Frascati. An avenue of ancient 
ilexes (now cruelly cut down) leads up through the park 
to the villa, which is preceded by a great walled 
1 The villa was begun by Martino Lunghi the Elder, in 1567, for the Cardinal 
Marco d’ Altemps, enlarged by Pope Gregory VII, and completed by Paul V and 
his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. See Gustav Ebe, “ Die Spatrenaissance.” 
148 
