ITALIAN VILLAS 
block plan, or with but slight projections, and rich though 
they are in detail, and stately in general composition, 
they lack that touch of fantasy which the Roman villa- 
architects knew how to impart. 
Before pronouncing this a defect, however, one must 
consider the different conditions under which Alessi and 
his fellow-architects in Genoa had to work. Annibale 
Lippi, Pirro Ligorio, Giacomo della Porta and Carlo 
Borromini reared their graceful loggias and stretched 
their airy colonnades against masses of luxuriant foliage 
and above a far-spreading landscape, 
wonderful 
To the sea’s edge for gloss and gloom, 
while Alessi and Montorsoli had to place their country 
houses on narrow ledges of waterless rock, with a thin 
coating of soil parched by the wind, and an outlook 
over the serried roofs and crowded shipping of a com- 
mercial city. The Genoese gardens are mere pockets 
of earth in coigns of masonry, where a few olives and 
bay-trees fight the sun-glare and sea-wind of a harsh 
winter and a burning summer. The beauty of the 
prospect consists in the noble outline of the harbour, 
enclosed in exquisitely modelled but leafless hills, and 
in the great blue stretch of sea on which, now and then, 
the mountains of Corsica float for a moment. It will 
be seen that, amid such surroundings, the architectural 
quality must predominate over the picturesque or natu- 
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