Italian Villas and Their Gardens

The house stands against a steep terraced hillside, formerly a part of the grounds, but now unfortunately divided from them by the railway cutting. A wide tapis vert still ascends the hill to a colossal Jupiter (under which the Admiral’s favourite dog is said to be buried); and when the villa is seen from the harbour one understands how necessary this stately terraced background was to the setting of the low-lying building. Beautiful indeed must have been the surroundings of the villa when Evelyn visited it in 1644, and described the marble terraces above the sea, the aviary “wherein grew trees of more than two feet in diameter, besides cypress, myrtles, lentiscuses and other rare shrubs,” and “the other two gardens full of orange-trees, citrons and pomegranates, fountains, grots and statues.” All but the statues have now disappeared, yet much of the old garden-magic lingers in the narrow strip between house and sea. It is the glory of the Italian garden-architects that neglect and disintegration cannot wholly mar the effects they were skilled in creating: effects due to such a fine sense of proportion, to so exquisite a perception of the relation between architecture and landscape, between verdure and marble, that while a trace of their plan remains one feels the spell of the whole.

When Rubens came to Genoa in 1607 he was so impressed by the magnificence of its great street of palaces—the lately built Strada Nuova—that he recorded his admiration in a series of etchings, published in Antwerp in 1622 under the title “Palazzi di Genova,” a priceless document for the student of Renaissance architecture in Italy, since the Flemish master did not content himself with mere impressionist sketches, like Canaletto’s fanciful Venetian etchings, but made careful architectural drawings and bird’s-eye views of all the principal Genoese palaces. As many of these buildings have since been altered, Rubens’s volume has the additional value of preserving a number of interesting details which might never have been recovered by subsequent study.

The Strada Nuova of Genoa, planned by Galeazzo Alessi between 1550 and 1560, is the earliest example in Europe of a street laid out by an architect with deliberate artistic intent, and designed to display the palaces with which he subsequently lined it. Hitherto, streets had formed themselves on the natural lines of traffic, and individual houses had sprung up along them without much regard to the site or style of their nearest neighbors. The Strada Nuova, on the contrary, was planned and carried out homogeneously, and was thus the progenitor of all the great street plans of modern Europe—of the Place Royale and the Place Vendôme in Paris, the great Place at Nancy, the grouping of Palladian palaces about the Basilica of Vicenza, and all subsequent attempts to create an organic whole out of a number of adjacent buildings. Even Lenfant’s plan of Washington may be said to owe its first impulse to the Perugian architect’s conception of a street of palaces.

When Alessi projected this great work he had open ground to build on, though, as Evelyn remarked, the rich Genoese merchants had, like the Hollanders, “little or no extent of ground to employ their estates in.” Still, there was space enough to permit of spreading porticoes and forecourts, and to one of the houses in the Strada Nuova Alessi gave the ample development and airy proportions of a true villa suburbana. This is the Palazzo Parodi, which, like the vanished Sauli palace, shows, instead of the block plan of the city dwelling, a central corps de bâtiment with pavilions crowned by open loggias, and a rusticated screen dividing the court from the street. It is curious that, save in the case of the beautiful Villa Sauli (now completely rebuilt), Alessi did not repeat this appropriate design in the country houses with which he adorned the suburbs of Genoa—those “ravishing retirements of the Genoese nobility” which prolonged the splendour of the city for miles along the coast. Of his remaining villas, all are built on the block plan, or with but slight projections, and rich though they are in detail, and stately in general composition, they lack that touch of fantasy which the Roman villa-architects knew how to impart.

Before pronouncing this a defect, however, one must consider the different conditions under which Alessi and his fellow-architects in Genoa had to work. Annibale Lippi, Pirro Ligorio, Giacomo della Porta and Carlo Borromini reared their graceful loggias and stretched their airy colonnades against masses of luxuriant foliage and above a far-spreading landscape,

wonderful

To the sea’s edge for gloss and gloom,

while Alessi and Montorsoli had to place their country houses on narrow ledges of waterless rock, with a thin coating of soil parched by the wind, and an outlook over the serried roofs and crowded shipping of a commercial city. The Genoese gardens are mere pockets of earth in coigns of masonry, where a few olives and bay-trees fight the sun-glare and sea-wind of a harsh winter and a burning summer. The beauty of the prospect consists in the noble outline of the harbour, enclosed in exquisitely modelled but leafless hills, and in the great blue stretch of sea on which, now and then, the mountains of Corsica float for a moment. It will be seen that, amid such surroundings, the architectural quality must predominate over the picturesque or naturalistic. Not only the natural restrictions of site and soil, but the severity of the landscape and the nearness of a great city, made it necessary that the Genoese villa-architects should produce their principal effects by means of masonry and sculpture, rather than of water and verdure. The somewhat heavy silhouette of the Genoese country houses is thus perhaps partly explained; for where the garden had to be a stone monument, it would have been illogical to make the house less massive.

The most famous of Alessi’s villas lies in the once fashionable suburb of Sampierdarena, to the west of Genoa. Here, along the shore, were clustered the most beautiful pleasure-houses of the merchant princes. The greater number have now been turned into tenements for factory-workers, or into actual factories, while the beautiful gardens descending to the sea have been cut in half by the railway and planted with cabbages and mulberries. Amid this labyrinth of grimy walls, crumbling loggias and waste ground heaped with melancholy refuse, it is not easy to find one’s way to the Villa Imperiali (now Scassi), the masterpiece of Alessi, which stands as a solitary witness to the former “ravishments” of Sampierdarena. By a happy chance this villa has become the property of the municipality, which has turned the house into a girls’ school, while the grounds are used as a public garden; and so well have house and grounds been preserved that the student of architecture may here obtain a good idea of the magnificence with which the Genoese nobles surrounded even their few weeks of villeggiatura. To match such magnificence, one must look to one of the great villas of the Roman cardinals; and, with the exception of the Villa Doria Pamphily (which is smaller) and of the Villa Albani, it would be difficult to cite an elevation where palatial size is combined with such lavish richness of ornament.

Alessi was once thought to have studied in Rome under Michelangelo; but Herr Gurlitt shows that the latter was absent from Rome from 1516 to 1535—that is, precisely during what must have been the formative period of Alessi’s talent. The Perugian architect certainly shows little trace of Michelangelesque influences, but seems to derive rather from the school of his own great contemporary, Palladio.

The Villa Scassi, with its Tuscan order below and fluted Corinthian pilasters above, its richly carved frieze and cornice, and its beautiful roof-balustrade, is perhaps more familiar to students than any other example of Genoese suburban architecture. Almost alone among Genoese villas, it stands at the foot of a hill, with gardens rising behind it instead of descending below it to the sea. Herr Gurlitt thinks these grounds are among the earliest in Italy in which the narrow mediæval hortus inclusus was blent with the wider lines of the landscape; indeed, he makes the somewhat surprising statement that “all the later garden-craft has its source in Alessi, who, in the Scassi gardens, has shown to the full his characteristic gift for preserving unity of conception in multiplicity of form.”

There could be no better definition of the garden-science of the Italian Renaissance; and if, as it seems probable, the Scassi gardens are earlier in date than the Boboli and the Orti Farnesiani, they certainly fill an important place in the evolution of the pleasure-ground; but the Vatican gardens, if they were really designed by Antonio da Sangallo, must still be regarded as the source from which the later school of landscape-architects drew their first inspiration. It was certainly here, and in the unfinished gardens of the Villa Madama, that the earliest attempts were made to bring the untamed forms of nature into relation with the disciplined lines of architecture.

Herr Gurlitt is, however, quite right in calling attention to the remarkable manner in which the architectural lines of the Scassi gardens have been adapted to their site, and also to the skill with which Alessi contrived the successive transition from the formal surroundings of the house to the sylvan freedom of the wooded hilltop beneath which it lies.

A broad terrace, gently sloping with the natural grade of the land, leads up to a long level walk beneath the high retaining-wall which sustains the second terrace. In the centre of this retaining-wall is a beautifully designed triple niche, divided by Atlantides supporting a delicately carved entablature, while a double flight of steps encloses this central composition. Niches with statues and marble seats also adorn the lateral walls of the gardens, and on the upper terrace is a long tank or canal, flanked by clipped shrubs and statues. Thence an inclined path leads to a rusticated temple with colonnes torses, and statues in niches above fluted basins into which water once flowed; and beyond this there is a winding ascent to the grove which crowns the hill. All the architectural details of the garden are remarkable for a classical purity and refinement, except the rusticated temple, of which the fantastic columns are carved to resemble tree-trunks. This may be of later date; but if contemporary, its baroque style was probably intended to mark the transition from the formality of the lower gardens to the rustic character of the naturalistic landscape above—to form, in fact, a gate from the garden to the park.

The end of the sixteenth century saw this gradual recognition of nature, and adoption of her forms, in the architecture and sculpture of the Italian pleasure-house, and more especially in those outlying constructions which connected the formal and the sylvan portions of the grounds. “In mid-Renaissance garden-architecture,” as Herr Tuckermann puts it, “the relation between art and landscape is reversed. Previously the garden had had to adapt itself to architecture; now architectural forms are forced into a resemblance with nature.”

Bernini was the great exponent of this new impulse, though it may be traced back as far as Michelangelo. It was Bernini who first expressed in his fountains the tremulous motion and shifting curves of water, and who put into his garden-sculpture that rustle of plein air which the modern painter seeks to express in his landscapes. To trace the gradual development of this rapprochement to nature at a period so highly artificial would be beyond the scope of these articles; but in judging the baroque garden architecture and sculpture of the late Renaissance, it should be remembered that they are not the expression of a wilful eccentricity, but an attempted link between the highly conventionalized forms of urban art and that life of the fields and woods which was beginning to charm the imagination of poets and painters.

On the height above the Acqua Sola gardens, on the eastern side of Genoa, lies Alessi’s other great country house, the Villa Pallavicini alle Peschiere—not to be confounded with the ridiculous Villa Pallavicini at Pegli, a brummagem creation of the early nineteenth century, to which the guide-books still send throngs of unsuspecting tourists, who come back imagining that this tawdry jumble of weeping willows and Chinese pagodas, mock Gothic ruins and exotic vegetation, represents the typical “Italian garden,” of which so much is said and so little really known.

The Villa Pallavicini alle Peschiere (a drawing of which may be seen in Rubens’s collection) is in site and design a typical Genoese suburban house of the sixteenth century. The lower story has a series of arched windows between Ionic pilasters; above are square-headed windows with upper lights, divided by fluted Corinthian pilasters and surmounted by a beautiful cornice and a roof-balustrade of unusual design, in which groups of balusters alternate with oblong panels of richly carved openwork. The very slightly projecting wings have, on both stories, arched recesses in which heroic statues are painted in grisaille.

The narrow ledge of ground on which the villa is built permits only of a broad terrace in front of the house, with a central basin surmounted by a beautiful winged figure and enclosed in stone-edged flower-beds. Stately flights of steps lead down to a lower terrace, of which the mighty retaining-wall is faced by a Doric portico, with a recessed loggia behind it. From this level other flights of steps, flanked by great balustraded walls nearly a hundred feet high, descend to a third terrace, narrower than the others, whence one looks down into lower-lying gardens, wedged into every projecting shelf of ground between palace roofs and towering slopes of masonry; while directly beneath this crowded foreground sparkles the blue expanse of the Mediterranean.

On a higher ledge, above the Villa Pallavicini, lies the Villa Durazzo-Grapollo, perhaps also a work of Alessi’s. Here the unusual extent of ground about the house has permitted an interesting development of landscape-architecture. A fine pedimented gateway with rusticated piers gives admission to a straight avenue of plane-trees leading up to the house, which is a dignified building with two stories, a mezzanine and an attic. The windows on the ground floor are square-headed, with oblong sunk panels above; while on the first floor there is a slightly baroque movement about the architraves, and every other window is surmounted by a curious shell-shaped pediment. On the garden side a beautiful marble balcony forms the central motive of the piano nobile, and the roof is enclosed in a balustrade with alternate solid panels and groups of balusters. The plan is oblong, with slightly projecting wings, adorned on both stories with coupled pilasters, which on the lower floor are rusticated and above are fluted Corinthian, painted on the stucco surface of the house. This painting of architectural ornament is very characteristic of Genoese architecture, and was done with such skill that, at a little distance, it is often impossible to distinguish a projecting architectural member from its frescoed counterfeit.

In front of the villa is a long narrow formal garden, supported on three sides by a lofty retaining-wall. Down the middle of this garden, on an axis with the central doorway of the façade, runs a canal terminated by reclining figures of river-gods and marble dolphins spouting water. An ilex-walk flanks it on each side, and at the farther end a balustrade encloses this upper garden, and two flights of steps, with the usual central niche, lead to the next level. Here there is a much greater extent of ground, and the old formal lines have been broken up into the winding paths and shrubberies of a jardin anglais. Even here, however, traces of the original plan may be discovered, and statues and fountains are scattered with charming effect among the irregular plantations, while paths between clipped walls of green lead to beautiful distant views of the sea and mountains. Specially interesting is the treatment of the lateral retaining-walls of the upper garden. In these immense ramparts of masonry have been cut tunnels decorated with shell-work and stucco ornament, which lead up by a succession of wide steps to the ground on a level with the house. One of these tunnels contains a series of pools of water, which finally pour into a stream winding through a romantic boschetto on a lower level. Here, as at the Villa Scassi, all the garden-architecture is pure and dignified in style, and there is great beauty in the broad and simple treatment of the upper terrace, with its canal and ilex-walks.

From the terraces of the Villa Durazzo one looks forth over the hillside of San Francesco d’Albaro, the suburb which balances Sampierdarena on the east. Happily this charming district is still a fashionable villeggiatura, and the houses which Alessi built on its slopes stand above an almost unaltered landscape of garden and vineyard. A fine road crosses the Bisagno and leads up between high walls and beautiful hanging gardens, passing at every turn some charming villa-façade in its setting of cypresses and camellias. Among these, one should not overlook the exquisite little Paradisino, a pale-green toy villa with Ionic pilasters and classic pediment, perched above a high terrace on the left of the ascent.

Just above stands the Paradiso (or Villa Cambiaso), another masterpiece of Alessi’s,5 to which it is almost impossible to obtain admission. Unfortunately, the house stands far back from the road, above intervening terraces and groves, and one can obtain only an imperfect glimpse of its beautiful façade, which is as ornate and imposing as that of the Villa Scassi, and of garden-walks lined with clipped hedges and statues.

At Alessi’s other Villa Cambiaso, higher up the hill of San Francesco d’Albaro, a more hospitable welcome awaits the sight-seer. Here admission is easily obtained, and it is possible to study and photograph at leisure. This villa is remarkable for the beauty of the central loggia on the ground floor of the façade: a grand Doric arcade, leading into a two-storied atrium designed in the severest classical spirit. So suggestive is this of the great loggia of the Villa Bombicci, near Florence, that one understands why Alessi was called the pupil of Michelangelo. At the back of the house there is (as at the Villa Bombicci) a fine upper loggia, and the wide spacing of the windows on the ground floor, and the massiveness and simplicity of all the architectural details, inevitably recall the Tuscan style. Little is left of the old gardens save a tapis vert flanked by clipped hedges, which descends to an iron grille on a lower road; but the broad grassy space about the house has a boundary-wall with a continuous marble bench, like that at the Villa Pia in the Vatican gardens.

In the valley between San Francesco d’Albaro and the Bisagno lies the dismal suburb of San Fruttuoso. Here one must seek, through a waste of dusty streets lined with half-finished tenements, for what must once have been the most beautiful of Genoese pleasure-houses—the Villa Imperiali, probably built by Fra Montorsoli. It stands high above broad terraced grounds of unusual extent, backed by a hanging wood; but all the old gardens have been destroyed, save the beautiful upper terrace, and even the house has suffered some injury, though not enough to detract greatly from its general effect. Here at last one finds that union of lightness and majesty which characterizes the Villa Medici and other Roman houses of its kind. The long elevation, with wings set back, has a rusticated basement, surmounted by two stories and an attic above the cornice. There is no order, but the whole façade is richly frescoed in a severe architectural style, with niches, statues in grisaille, and other ornaments, all executed by a skilful hand. The windows on the first floor have broken pediments with a shell-like movement, and those above show the same treatment, alternating with the usual triangular pediment. But the crowning distinction of the house consists in the two exquisite loggias which form the angles of the second story. These tall arcades, resting on slender columns, give a wonderful effect of spreading lightness to the façade, and break up its great bulk without disturbing the general impression of strength and dignity. As a skilful distribution of masses the elevation of the Villa Imperiali deserves the most careful study, and it is to be regretted that it can no longer be seen in combination with the wide-spread terraces which once formed a part of its composition.

VI

LOMBARD VILLAS

On the walls of the muniment-room of the old Borromeo palace in Milan, Michelino, a little-known painter of the fifteenth century, has depicted the sports and diversions of that noble family. Here may be seen ladies in peaked hennins and long drooping sleeves, with their shock-headed gallants in fur-edged tunics and pointed shoes, engaged in curious games and dances, against the background of Lake Maggiore and the Borromean Islands.

It takes the modern traveller an effort of mental readjustment to recognize in this “clump of peakèd isles”—bare Leonardesque rocks thrusting themselves splinter-wise above the lake—the smiling groves and terraces of the Isola Bella and the Isola Madre. For in those days the Borromei had not converted their rocky islands into the hanging gardens which to later travellers became one of the most important sights of the “grand tour”; and one may learn from this curious fresco with what seemingly hopeless problems the Italian garden-art dealt, and how, while audaciously remodelling nature, it contrived to keep in harmony with the surroundings amid which it worked.

The Isola Madre, the largest of the Borromean group, was the first to be built on and planted. The plain Renaissance palace still looks down on a series of walled gardens and a grove of cypress, laurel and pine; but the greater part of the island has been turned into an English park of no special interest save to the horticulturist, who may study here the immense variety of exotic plants which flourish in the mild climate of the lakes. The Isola Bella, that pyramid of flower-laden terraces rising opposite Stresa, in a lovely bend of the lake, began to take its present shape about 1632, when Count Carlo III built a casino di delizie on the rocky pinnacle. His son, Count Vitaliano IV, continued and completed the work. He levelled the pointed rocks, filled their interstices with countless loads of soil from the mainland, and summoned Carlo Fontana and a group of Milanese architects to raise the palace and garden-pavilions above terraces created by Castelli and Crivelli, while the waterworks were entrusted to Mora of Rome, the statuary and other ornamental sculpture to Vismara. The work was completed in 1671, and the island, which had been created a baronial fief, was renamed Isola Isabella, after the count’s mother—a name which euphony, and the general admiration the place excited, soon combined to contract to Isola Bella.

The island is built up in ten terraces, narrowing successively toward the top, the lowest resting on great vaulted arcades which project into the lake and are used as a winter shelter for the lemon-trees of the upper gardens. Each terrace is enclosed in a marble balustrade, richly ornamented with vases, statues and obelisks, and planted with a profusion of roses, camellias, jasmine, myrtle and pomegranate, among which groups of cypresses lift their dark shafts. Against the retaining-walls oranges and lemons are espaliered, and flowers border every path and wreathe every balustrade and stairway. It seems probable, from the old descriptions of the Isola Bella, that it was originally planted much as it now appears; in fact, the gardens of the Italian lakes are probably the only old pleasure-grounds of Italy where flowers have always been used in profusion. In the equable lake climate, neither cold in winter, like the Lombard plains, nor parched in summer, like the South, the passion for horticulture seems to have developed early, and the landscape-architect was accustomed to mingle bright colours with his architectural masses, instead of relying on a setting of uniform verdure.

The topmost terrace of the Isola Bella is crowned by a mount, against which is built a water-theatre of excessively baroque design. This architectural composition faces the southern front of the palace, a large and not very interesting building standing to the north of the gardens; while the southern extremity of the island terminates in a beautiful garden-pavilion, hexagonal in shape, with rusticated coigns and a crowning balustrade beset with statues. Even the narrow reef projecting into the lake below this pavilion has been converted into another series of terraces, with connecting flights of steps, which carry down to the water’s edge the exuberant verdure of the upper gardens.