210 
THE GARDENS OF ITALY. 
have attended his master when he came to Tivoli to escape the heat of Rome. When Pope 
Gregory visited Cardinal Luigi these bare walls were brave with green and crimson velvet, and 
the Pope’s bed was hung with velvet curtains embroidered with seed pearls which had belonged 
to Henry II of France. E. M. P. 
Although our imagination boggles at the vast cost of the great Renaissance villas of Tivoli 
and Frascati, one can imagine one of those cardinal builders showing his guests over his works 
in progress, and concluding with the deprecatory remark : “ This is a mere nothing, as you will 
see when I drive you over to the Villa of Hadrian. A poor cardinal cannot pretend to rival 
the undisputed master of 
the world.” Of all the 
building emperors 
Hadrian would seem to 
have been one of the 
most capricious. 
We do not know 
enough about Nero’s 
golden house to establish 
a comparison, but 
Diocletian’s fortress 
palace of Spalatro is a 
reasonable and practical 
dwelling compared with 
Hadrian’s Villa, which 
seems like some modern 
exhibition city, • Roman 
only in its permanence. 
Hadrian’s Villa to-day, 
220. — HEMICYCLE OF THE IMPERIAL PALACE AT THE VILLA HADRIANA, besides being a lovcly 
park in the plains below 
the mountains of Tivoli, studded with cypresses, oaks, olive trees and dense thickets where the 
nightingales love to sing, is also a remarkable school of building construction (Figs. 219 and 220). 
It was probablv begun in 125 a.d., and carried on for thirteen years up to Hadrian’s death in 138 a.d. 
The epoch of Hadrian seems to have been one in which Roman brick-faced concrete reached its 
greatest development. The soundness of the method is shown by survivals through far worse 
ravages than those of some two thousand years of time. Every age has pillaged these remains, from 
Constantine to modern times, and Tivoli must be largely built out of its spoils. The excellence 
of the facework of small squares of tufa stone set diagonally, opus reticidatum, bonded b\ 
bands of the famous thin, flat Roman bricks, which resemble our paving tiles, might lead the 
spectator to suppose that he sees the finished face of the walls. It is clear, however, that all 
was hidden by marble casing and plasterwork. The diagonal disposition of the material must 
have commended itself to the practical minds of the Romans by the ease with which the facing 
could be placed in position ready for the filling in of the rubble concrete behind. The inlaid 
marble floors, where they exist in patches recently excavated, are gorgeous, and many marble 
fragments of columns, cornices, etc., remain to prove a high standard of architectural detail. 
The great vaults seem in many cases to have been lined with white, and probably also 
with colour mosaic. The cubes are oblongs of white marble, so as to have a tooth-like 
hold into their matrix. 
It is well-nigh impossible to ravel out the tangled skein of buildings which cover about one 
hundred and sixty acres of the present park-like grounds. In a general way we know that the 
Imperial idea was that of a souvenir in miniature of the great buildings of the Roman World which 
Hadrian had seen in his far-spread travels. The very variety of the restorations made on paper 
illustrates the complexity of the problem, while even the names assigned to the various 
structures differ. It is clear that one interesting block is a miniature of the great Imperial 
