50 
House 
& Garden 
AMERICAN ANTIQUES IN ITALY 
Points of Similarity Between Italian and American Furniture Made These Pieces Appear 
at Home in Their Unusual Setting 
H. D. EBERLEIN and ROBERT B. C. M. CARERRE 
C ARRYING coals to New Cas¬ 
tle can scarcely be called an act 
of wisdom. Neither would the 
carrying of American antiques to Italy 
seem any more to be commended on 
that score. However, under the sav¬ 
ing grace of “exceptions that prove 
the rule”, one may find justifiable in¬ 
stances contradictory of almost every¬ 
thing that is usually deemed the wise 
or proper thing to do. 
The transporting of American an¬ 
tiques to Italy to be used in the partial 
equipment of an Italian house, in the 
case under present consideration, was 
quite justifiable on the grounds of 
personal attachment to the objects 
which the American owners wished to 
keep about them in their new home 
overseas. It is always a wrench to 
sacrifice one’s Lares and Penates, and 
a sacrifice that ought not to be made 
save under stress of the direst neces¬ 
sity. It was quite justifiable, too, on 
the score of decorative propriety, as 
the illustrations show. Good taste and 
tact in combining the American pieces 
with supplementary Italian acquisi¬ 
tions produced results agreeable and il¬ 
lustrative of certain sound principles. 
The House 
The Villa Ruspoli, just outside of 
Florence, is much like other moderate¬ 
sized Tuscan villas except 
that being of modem con¬ 
struction it has rather more 
coherence of plan than the 
older dwellings, which often 
represent a long period of 
growth with sundry addi¬ 
tions made from century to 
century. The house is L- 
shaped with the entrance at 
the angle. To the left, upon 
entering, at the elbow of 
the L, is the service portion 
of the establishment, while 
to the right are the draw¬ 
ing room, dining room, li¬ 
brary, and several smaller 
apartments. 
The house is comfortably 
spacious and, as is fre¬ 
quently the case in the mod¬ 
em villas, there are no door 
nor window trims with 
molded projections of stone, 
wood or plaster, but all the 
openings are merely sharply 
rectangular penetrations in 
the plaster surface of the 
walls. The doors are often 
The niche on the stairs was formerly painted black and the 
walls had a striped dado and frieze. All this was eliminated 
by painting the walls cream with a plain dark base line 
Combined with Italian pieces in the library are American antiques—(i Queen Anne 
walnut lowboy, upholstered sofa and chair and little mahogany pedestal tables. The 
polychrome decorations of the ceiling, painted on the flat surface, remain as originally 
set back a few inches within the jamb. 
Sometimes, in this type of house, a 
doorway boasts a broad, flat, and ab¬ 
solutely unadorned stone architrave, 
projecting about half an inch from 
the wall surface, but this is the utmost 
elaboration and by no means univer¬ 
sal. The window reveals are slightly 
splayed and the casement woodwork 
is as plain as a pipe stem. 
Walls and Decorations 
Thus the background to begin with 
was favorable in that there were no 
architectural features at all of a pro¬ 
nounced character to interject a pos¬ 
sibly disturbing or limiting element. 
The only intractable feature was the 
painted decoration—polychrome da¬ 
dos and stripings, with paneling 
painted in perspective, while the niche 
on the staircase glowered in gloomy 
black. All of this was promptly 
eliminated—it was the only possible 
thing to do—and the walls from top 
to bottom were uniformly painted a 
pale cream color, with a plain dark 
base line extending about 9" above 
the floor. 
The polychrome decorations of the 
beamed ceilings in the drawing room, 
library, and dining room were allowed 
to remain untouched. The doorway 
decoration in the drawing room—■ 
which is not in relief at all 
but painted on the perfectly 
flat plaster surface—was 
also retained. Up to this 
point one may see how much 
could be accomplished by 
merely neutralizing the 
background. The painted 
ceilings and the tiled floors, 
so characteristic of all Ital¬ 
ian work, yield a note of 
cosmopolitan interest that is 
not in the least objection¬ 
able or incongruous. 
The Drawing Room 
When we come to analyze 
the furnishing of the draw¬ 
ing room, we find, at one 
end, an American Empire 
mahogany sofa, an Ameri¬ 
can mahogany Chippendale 
chair, near it a mahogany 
Heppelwhite armchair; in 
the nearer foreground aai 
Italian painted chair of 
Heppelwhite affinities, a 
painted commode or lowboy 
