VILLA, the Latin word (diminutive of vices, a village) for a country-house. The word is loosely and incorrectly used, especially in England, for small detached or semi-detached suburban houses. In its correct usage, however, it signifies a summer residence of great extent, especially in Italy, or one in which Italian influence is dominant. References to the villa are constantly made by Roman writers. Cicero is said to have possessed no less than seven villas, the oldest of which was near Arpinum ; Pliny the younger had three or four, two of which he described at length in his letters; that at Tusculum and that near Laurentium. The remains of the villa of Hadrian at Tivoli, which covered an area over 7 m. long and in which reproductions were made of all the most celebrated buildings he had seen during his travels, and the villas of the 16th century on similar sites, such as the Villa d'Este near Tivoli, enable one to form some idea of the exceptional beauty of the positions selected and of the splendour of the structures which enriched them. Literary descriptions, as well as existing remains, reveal the house proper of the Roman villa as a rather rambling building designed to take advantage of breeze and view, rather than to be symmetrical. Long colonnades were frequent, there were occasional towers, and the building was often on more than one level. R. Lanciani (Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Excavations, 279 ff.) states that the Casino del Ligorio (Villa Pia) in the Vatican gardens (I558-62), by P. Ligorio, and the Barberini villa at Castel Gandolfo of all existing Renaissance villas most closely resemble their Roman prototypes. Such villas were not limited to Italy but are found throughout the empire.
According to Pliny, there were two kinds of villas, the villa urbana, which was a country-seat and the villa rustica, the farm house. The Villa Boscoreale near Pompeii, which was excavated in 1893-94, is an example of the villa rustica, in which the princi pal room was the kitchen, with the bakery and stables beyond and room for the wine presses, oil presses, hand mill, etc. The villas near Rome were all built on hilly sites, so that the laying out of the ground in terraces formed a very important element in their design, and this forms the chief attraction of the Italian villas of the i6th century, among which the following are the best known : the Villa Madama, the design of which, attributed to Raphael, was carried out by Giulio Romano in 152o; the Villa Medici (I540); the Villa Albani, near the Porta Salaria; the Borghese ; the Doria Pamphili (1650) ; the Villa di Papa Giulio (1550), designed by Vignola; the Aldobrandini (1598-1603) by G. della Porta; the Falconieri (1546) and the Mondragone Villas
(1573-75) at Frascati, and the Villa d'Este near Tivoli by P. Ligorio, in which the terraces and staircases are of great ingenuity and beauty. In the proximity of other towns in Italy there are numerous villas, of which the example best known is that of the Villa Rotunda or Capra, by A. Palladio, near Vicenza, which was copied by Lord Burlington in his house at Chiswick.
The Italian villas of the i6th and 17th centuries, like those of Roman times, included not only the country residence, but all the other buildings on the estate, such as bridges, casinos, pavilions and small temples, which were utilized as summer-houses; and these seem to have had a certain influence in England, which may account for the numerous imitations in the large parks in Eng land, as also the laying out of terraces, grottos and formal gardens. In France the same influence was felt, and at Fontainebleau, Ver sailles (1667-88), Meudon and other royal palaces, Le Notre transformed the parks surrounding them and introduced many Italian features.
and Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquites grecques et romaines (1877-1919) ; W. R. Tuckerman, Die Garten kunst der italienischen Renaissance-Zeit (1884) ; R. Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Excavations (1889) ; P. Gusman, La Villa Imperiale de Tibur (1904) ; J. Durm, "Baukunst der Romer," in Handbuch der Architektur (1905) ; H. I. Triggs, The Art of Gar den Design in Italy (1905) ; R. Lanciani, Wanderings in the Roman CamPagrui (1909) ; Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and their Gardens (Iwo) ; G. Lowell, Smaller Italian Villas and Farmhouses (1916) ; H. H. Tanzer, The Villas of Pliny the Younger (1924).