ITALIAN VILLAS 
attic story is set still farther back, so that its balustraded 
roof-line forms a background for the richly decorated 
facade, and the building, though large, thus preserves 
the airy look and lightness of proportion which had 
come to be regarded as suited to the suburban pleasure- 
house. 
To the right of the villa, the composition is prolonged 
by a gateway with coupled columns surmounted by 
stone dogs, and leading from the forecourt to the 
adjoining basse-cour. About the latter are grouped a 
number of low farm-buildings, to which a touch of the 
baroque gives picturesqueness. In the charm of its 
elevation, and in the happy juxtaposition of garden- 
walls and outbuildings, the Villa Falconieri forms the 
most harmonious and successful example of garden- 
architecture in Frascati. 
The elevation which most resembles it is that of the 
Villa Lancellotti. Here the house, which is probably 
nearly a century earlier, shows the same happy use of 
the open loggia, which in this case forms the central 
feature of the first story, above a stately pedimented 
doorway. The loggia is surmounted by a kind of 
square-headed gable crowned by a balustrade with 
statues, and the fagade on each side of this central com- 
position is almost Tuscan in its severity. Before the 
house lies a beautiful box-garden of intricate design, 
enclosed in high walls of ilex, with the inevitable theatre 
cT eau at its farther end. This is a semicircular compo- 
164 
