Wharton, Edith; Parrish, Maxfield [Ill.]: Italian villas and their gardens (London: John Lane, 1904)

I

FLORENTINE VILLAS

FOR centuries Florence has been celebrated for
her villa-clad hills. According to an old chron-
icler, the country houses were more splendid
than those in the town, and stood so close-set among
their olive-orchards and vineyards that the traveller
“thought himself in Florence three leagues before
reaching the city.”
Many of these houses still survive, strongly planted
on their broad terraces, from the fifteenth-century farm-
house-villa, with its projecting eaves and square tower,
to the many-windowed maison de plaisance in which
the luxurious nobles of the seventeenth century spent
the gambling and chocolate-drinking weeks of the vin-
tage season. It is characteristic of Florentine thrift and
conservatism that the greater number of these later and
more pretentious villas are merely additions to the plain
old buildings, while, even in the rare cases where the
whole structure is new, the baroque exuberance which
became fashionable in the seventeenth century is tem-
pered by a restraint and severity peculiarly Tuscan.
So numerous and well preserved are the buildings
*9