ITALIAN GARDENS OF THE RENAISSANCE 
Palace. O blessed country life, how untold are your 
joys!” 1 
So Leo Battista Alberti, the greatest prose writer 
of the age, sings the praises of the simple life. His 
words recall many a plain white-washed villa of the 
fifteenth century which is still to be found hidden 
among the olive-woods round Florence, with a clump 
of cypresses by the gateway and a hedge of roses and 
blue iris along the path where the young wheat is 
sprouting in the furrow. 
The Italians, like the old Romans, were always 
careful to discriminate between the Villa Urbana and 
Rustica , the one a palatial building in the city or its 
immediate neighbourhood, the other a modest, oblong 
house with broad eaves and square tower, half farm 
and half fortress—the podere or vigna of the landlord 
who spends six months of the year on his estates. On 
one occasion, indeed, an animated debate was held in 
the Roman Academy as to the different meaning of the 
words villa and vigna, and the philosophers who 
discussed the question finally decided that their 
significance was precisely the same. But whether the 
villa stood in the city or country, the garden was 
always treated as an integral part of the house, a place 
to be lived in, which must be adapted to the architec¬ 
tural design of the building as well as to the require- 
1 Del Governo della Eamiglia, p. 109. 
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