File:Italian villas and their gardens (1904) (14591854759).jpg

Identifier: italianvillasth00whar (find matches)
Title: Italian villas and their gardens
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937 Parrish, Maxfield, 1870-1966
Subjects: Architecture Architecture, Domestic Landscape gardening
Publisher: New York : The Century Co.
Contributing Library: NCSU Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: NCSU Libraries

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hisGarden one goes in a level to all the rest of the Alleysand Parterres, Herb-Gardens and Flower-Gardens, inall which there are Varieties of Fountains and Ar-bors, but the great Parterre is a surprizing thing, for asit is well furnished with Statues and Fountains, and isof a vast extent, and justly scituated to the Palace, so atthe further-end of it there is a great Mount, that face ofit that looks to the Parterre is made like a Theatre allfull of Fountains and Statues, the height rising up in fiveseveral rows . . . and round this Mount, answering tothe five rows into which the Theatre is divided, there goesas Many Terrasses of noble Walks, the Walls are all asclose covered with Oranges and Citrons as any of ourWalls in England2X^ wath Laurel: the top of the Mountis seventy foot long and forty broad, and here is a vastCestern into which the Mill plays up the water that mustfurnish all the Fountains . . . The freshness of the Air,it being both in a Lake and near the Mountains, the 202
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LOMBARD VILLAS fragrant smell, the beautiful Prospect, and the delightingVariety that is here makes it such a habitation for Sum-mer that perhaps the whole World hath nothing like it.Seventeenth-century travellers were unanimous inextolling the Isola Bella, though, as might have beenexpected, their praise was chiefly for those elaborationsand ingenuities of planning and engineering which giveleast pleasure in the present day. Toward the middleof the eighteenth century a critical reaction set in.Tourists, enamoured of the new English garden, andof Rousseaus descriptions of the bosquet de Julie,could see nothing to admire in the ordered architectureof the Borromean Islands. The sentimental sight-seer,sighing for sham Gothic ruins, for glades planted afterPoussin, and for all the laboured naturalism of Reptonand Capability Brown, shuddered at the frank artificeof the old Italian garden-architecture. The quarrelthen begun still goes on, and sympathies are dividedbetween the artificial-nat

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