Edith Wharton

Italian Villas and Their Gardens Edith Wharton

For centuries Florence has been celebrated for her villa-clad hills. According to an old chronicler, the country houses were more splendid than those in the town, and stood so close-set among theirolive-orchards and vineyards that the traveller "thought himself in Florence three leagues beforereaching the city."Many of these houses still survive, strongly planted on their broad terraces, from the fifteenthcentury farmhouse-villa, with its projecting eaves and square tower, to the many-windowed maison deplaisance in which the luxurious nobles of the seventeenth century spent the gambling and chocolatedrinking weeks of the vintage season. It is characteristic of Florentine thrift and conservatism thatthe greater number of these later and more pretentious villas are merely additions to the plain oldbuildings, while, even in the rare cases where the whole structure is new, the baroque exuberancewhich became fashionable in the seventeenth century is tempered by a restraint and severitypeculiarly Tuscan