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

ITALIAN VILLAS
attic story is set still farther back, so that its balustraded
roof-line forms a background for the richly decorated
fagade, and the building, though large, thus preserves
the airy look and lightness of proportion which had
come to be regarded as suited to the suburban pleasure-
house.
To the right of the villa, the composition is prolonged
by a gateway with coupled columns surmounted by
stone dogs, and leading from the forecourt to the
adjoining basse-cour. About the latter are grouped a
number of low farm-buildings, to which a touch of the
baroque gives picturesqueness. In the charm of its
elevation, and in the happy juxtaposition of garden-
walls and outbuildings, the Villa Falconieri forms the
most harmonious and successful example of garden-
architecture in Frascati.
The elevation which most resembles it is that of the
Villa Lancellotti. Here the house, which is probably
nearly a century earlier, shows the same happy use of
the open loggia, which in this case forms the central
feature of the first story, above a stately pedimented
doorway. The loggia is surmounted by a kind of
square-headed gable crowned by a balustrade with
statues, and the fagade on each side of this central com-
position is almost Tuscan in its severity. Before the
house lies a beautiful box-garden of intricate design,
enclosed in high walls of ilex, with the inevitable theatre
d'eatt at its farther end. This is a semicircular compo-
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