20 
ROMAN VILLAS AND GARDENS. 
character, there are few more powerful styles than the Roman Renaissance as exemplified in her 
palaces. We know very little of the house building of old Rome, but as every discovery seems 
to tend towards establishing an equality of knowledge, so that there are verv few things in 
building which we could show as distinctly unknown to antiquity, it is highly probable that 
Renaissance Rome, in its ordinary house building, is the direct descendant of old Rome, and that the 
ground idea goes still further back into Etruscan origins. That in the streets of old Rome there 
were great and lofty buildings is quite certain. The hundred foot wall of the apsidal screen which 
rose behind the Temple of Mars Ultor even in the days of Augustus gives us an idea of the scale 
of Roman building. The peculiar character of the Roman palace was, perhaps, evolved in 
embryo by the Etruscan, whose method of carrying the ridge pole on a pier, in preference to the 
use of a truss, may still be seen carried on in the common buildings of village and countryside. 
North Italian architects, like Bramante, were absorbed bv the atmosphere of Rome ; 
Venetians, like Palladio, were transformed under the influence of the mighty remains of the 
past. This indelible influence of Rome is responsible for the massive grandeur of the great 
]talaces and villas of the Renaissance in Rome, Frascati and Tivoli, and those in surrounding centres 
like Caprarola and Bagnaia. A. T. B. 
