Ville d'Italia

Luigi Speranza

A villa was, originally, an ancient Roman upper-class country house.

Since its origins in the Roman villa, the idea and function of a villa have evolved considerably.

After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became small farming compounds, which were increasingly fortified in Late Antiquity, sometimes transferred to the Church for reuse as a monastery.

Then they gradually re-evolved through the Middle Ages, into elegant upper-class country homes.

In Italian modern parlance 'villa' can refer to a various types and sizes of residences, ranging from the suburban "semi-detached" double villa to residences in the wildland-urban interface. Main article: Roman villa

In ancient Roman architecture, a "villa" was originally a _country_ house built for the elite.

According to Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, there were several kinds of villas:

a. the villa urbana, which was a country seat that could easily be reached from Rome or another city for a night or two, and

b. the villa rustica, the farm-house estate that was permanently occupied by the servants who had charge generally of the estate, which would centre on the villa itself, perhaps only seasonally occupied.

The Roman villae rusticae at the heart of latifundia were the earliest versions of what later and elsewhere became called plantations.

Not included as villae were the domus, a city house for the elite and privileged classes; and insulae, blocks of apartment buildings for the rest of the population.

In Satyricon Petronius described the wide range of Roman dwellings.

There were a concentration of Imperial villas on the Gulf of Naples, on the Isle of Capri, at Monte Circeo and at Antium (Anzio).

Examples are the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum; and the "Villa of the Mysteries" and "Villa of the Vettii" in Pompeii.

Wealthy Romans also escaped the summer heat in the hills round Rome, especially around Tibur (Tivoli) and Frascati, such as at Hadrian's Villa.

Cicero is said to have possessed no fewer than seven villas, the oldest of which was near Arpinum, which he inherited.

Pliny the Younger had three or four, of which the example near Laurentium is the best known from his descriptions.

Roman writers refer with satisfaction to the self-sufficiency of their latifundium villas, where they drank their own wine and pressed their own oil.

This was an affectation of urban aristocrats playing at being old-fashioned virtuous Roman farmers, but the economic independence of later rural villas was a symptom of the increasing economic fragmentation of the Roman Empire.

With the decline and collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, the villas were more and more isolated and came to be protected by walls.

In regions in Italy, large working villas and overgrown abandoned ones were donated by aristocrats and territorial magnates to individual monks, becoming the nuclei of monasteries.

In this way, the Italian villa system of late Antiquity was preserved into the early Medieval period, in the form of monasteries that survived the disruptions of the Gothic War (535–552) and the Lombards.

Benedict of Nursia established his influential monastery of Monte Cassino in the ruins of a villa at Subiaco that had belonged to Nero.

In 14th and 15th century Italy, a villa once more connoted a country house, like the first Medici villas, the Villa del Trebbio and that at Cafaggiolo, both strong fortified houses built in the 14th century in the Mugello region near Florence.

In 1450 Giovanni de' Medici commenced on a hillside the Villa Medici in Fiesole, Tuscany, probably the first villa created under the instructions of Leon Battista Alberti, who theorized the features of the new idea of villa in his "De re aedificatoria".

These first examples of Renaissance villa predate the age of Lorenzo de' Medici, who added the Villa di Poggio a Caiano by Giuliano da Sangallo, begun in 1470, in Poggio a Caiano, Province of Prato, Tuscany.

From Tuscany the idea of villa was spread again through Renaissance Italy and Europe.

The Quattrocento villa gardens were treated as a fundamental and aesthetic link between a residential building and the outdoors, with views over a humanized agricultural landscape, at that time the only desirable aspect of nature. Later villas and gardens include the Palazzo Pitti and Boboli Gardens, Florence; the Villa di Pratolino, Province of Siena.

Rome had more than its share of villas with easy reach of the small sixteenth-century city: the progenitor, the first villa suburbana built since Antiquity, was the Belvedere or palazzetto, designed by Antonio Pollaiuolo and built on the slope above the Vatican Palace.

The Villa Madama, the design of which, attributed to Raphael and carried out by Giulio Romano in 1520, was one of the most influential private houses ever built; elements derived from Villa Madama appeared in villas through the 19th century.

Villa Albani was built near the Porta Salaria.

Other are the Villa Borghese; the Villa Doria Pamphili (1650); the Villa Giulia of Pope Julius III (1550), designed by Vignola.

The Roman villas Villa Ludovisi and Villa Montalto, were destroyed during the late nineteenth century in the wake of the real estate bubble that took place in Rome after the seat of government of a united Italy was established at Rome.

The cool hills of Frascati gained the Villa Aldobrandini (1592).

The Villa Falconieri and the Villa Mondragone.

The Villa d'Este near Tivoli is famous for the water play in its terraced gardens.

The Villa Medici was on the edge of Rome, on the Pincian Hill, when it was built in 1540.

Besides these designed for seasonal pleasure, usually located within easy distance of a city, other Italian villas were remade from a rocca or castello, as the family seat of power, such as Villa Caprarola for the Farnese.

Near Siena in Tuscany, the Villa Cetinale was built by Cardinal Flavio Chigi.

He employed Carlo Fontana, pupil of Gian Lorenzo Bernini to transform the villa and dramatic gardens in a Roman Baroque style by 1680. The Villa Lante garden is one of the most sublime creations of the Italian villa in the landscape, completed in the 17th century.

cfr. Palladian Villas and Palladian Villas of the Veneto
In the later 16th century in the northeastern Italian Peninsula the Palladian Villas of the Veneto, designed by Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), were built in Vicenza in the Republic of Venice (Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia). Palladio always designed his villas with reference to their setting. He often unified all the farm buildings into the architecture of his extended villas. Examples are the Villa Emo, the Villa Godi, the Villa Forni Cerato, the Villa Capra "La Rotonda", and Villa Foscari