House & Garden 
regard for its pos- 
s i b 1 e harmony, 
for its purpose, 
for its connection 
with the building. 
Fancy our doing 
that! We would 
be clapping a 
poster where 
there ought to be a 
mural painting, we 
would be painting 
delicately where a 
passage was to be, 
or we would be 
leaving bare a 
space in the midst 
of a thickly-fig¬ 
ured wall. We do 
thelikeofall these 
things in treating 
the open spaces 
of our cities. 
Let us consider 
the first group to 
see what rules may guide us in its handling. 
So far as a clearing among the crowded 
streets of a town had conscious design, in¬ 
stead of accidental origin, it was fixed pri¬ 
marily as a market. The Piazza delle Erbe 
in Verona is to-day a good example of the 
principle—the white umbrella-awnings of its 
THE PIAZZA DI S. CROCE FLORENCE 
FORLI 
countless booths quivering in the breeze un¬ 
til, as one looks down upon it, it is like a 
sun-flecked, shimmering sea. In other Old 
World cities one may often find the space 
around the cathedral thus in use. But once 
the community has felt the impetus of modern 
ideas in city building, the market is swept 
aside into its proper place where the traffic 
of the way flows before, rather than through, 
it. Then arises the first problem of the dis¬ 
tinctly “city” square. The suddenly dis¬ 
used space is in a crowded portion of the 
city, is comparatively roomy, and is generally 
before an important public building—govern¬ 
mental or religious—whose strong and per¬ 
manent attraction of the people accounted 
for the market’s location there. The travel 
through the square is considerable. 
In determining the treatment to be here 
adopted, three things should be considered: 
first, the traffic’s accommodation and its con¬ 
venience ; second, the character of the neigh¬ 
borhood as a whole and how its monotony 
may be relieved by this opportunity ; third, 
what is required for the harmonious setting of 
such of the abutting architecture as may be 
deemed fairly permanent. Such architecture 
is likely to include the public building. 
THE PIAZZA VITTORIO EMANUELE (PIAZZA MAGGIORE) 
2 53 
