VILLA (Lat., country-house, farm). Prop erly a somewhat extensive country estate, occu pied for purposes of rest and pleasure for a part of the year. The term is used to indicate the house and grounds together. It is not used of farms, nor of rural o• suburban estates occupied the whole year round. Its meaning is fitly ren dered by the French equivalent amison di plai sauce. The villa originated with the ancient Ro mans, and received its highest development in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The villas of the Romans were extensive estates; the buildings for residence covered a large area and provided apartments for eating. sleeping, recreation, study, exercise, and bathing; the whole were set in and combined with grounds laid out with the highest art. Pliny had five villas; Cicero at least as many; and that of Hadrian at Tivoli covered nearly a square mile of territory. The Italian villas of the Renaissance were due in large measure to the splendor of the Papal Court. They were intended as places for brief sojourn and recreation rather than for a season's residence like those of antiquity. They are therefore gen erally smaller, and the buildings far less impor tant than those of the ancients. The grounds re produce in little, and with consummate skill, all the most characteristic features of the antique gardens. Some, like that at Castel Gandolfo. are
built on the ruins of ancient villa-terraces. The villas Pamfili, Bo•ghese, Albani, "Medici, Madama, and Papa Giulio, at Rome, those at Frascati. the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, and the Villa Lantc at Bagnaia, near Viterbo, are among the best known. They represent a type of formal land scape gardening and architecture which has nowhere else been brought to the same per fection. The villas of more modern date in Europe and America borrow from the Italian villas many suggestions as to landscape architec ture and detail, but, being intended for a sea son's residence, the dwelling presents more of the character of permanence, and of a regular habitation, than the casino of the Italian villas, and is accompanied by dependencies such as stables, gardeners' lodges, tennis courts, and kitchen gardens, which are foreign to the pur poses of the Italian villa. See CASINO. Consult : Pereier and Fontaine, .11«isons Pie plaisanec de Bone; Let a roni ly, Edifices de Nome modern(' (Paris, 1860) ; Reynolds, "Italian Villas," in Architectural Reeord (1896?) ; Pliny, Letters.