Italian Villas and Their Gardens

by Edith Wharton

The flat environs of Milan were once dotted with country houses, but with the growth of the city and the increased facilities of travel, these have been for the most part abandoned for villas in the hills or on the lakes, and to form an idea of their former splendour one must turn to the pages of Alberto del Rè’s rare volumes. Here one may see in all its detail that elaborate style of gardening which the French landscape-gardeners developed from the “grand manner” acquired by Le Nôtre in his study of the great Roman country-seats. This style, adapted to the flat French landscape, and complicated by the mannerisms and elaborations of the eighteenth century, came back to Italy with the French fashions which Piedmont and Lombardy were so fond of importing. The time had passed when Europe modelled itself on Italy: France was now the glass of fashion, and, in northern Italy especially, French architecture and gardening were eagerly reproduced.

In Lombardy the natural conditions were so similar that the French geometrical gardens did not seem out of place; yet even here a difference is felt, both in the architecture and the gardens. Italy, in spite of Palladio and the Palladian tradition, never freed herself from the baroque. Her artistic tendencies were all toward freedom, improvisation, individual expression, while France was fundamentally classical and instinctively temperate. Just as the French cabinet-makers and bronze-chisellers and modellers in stucco produced more delicate and finished, but less personal, work than the Italian craftsmen, so the French architects designed with greater precision and restraint, and less play of personal invention. To establish a rough distinction, it might be said that French art has always been intellectual and Italian art emotional; and this distinction is felt even in the treatment of the pleasure-house and its garden. In Italy the architectural detail remained baroque till the end of the eighteenth century, and the architect permitted himself far greater license in the choice of forms and the combination of materials. The old villas of the Milanese have a very strong individuality, and it is to be regretted that so few remain intact to show what a personal style they preserved even under the most obvious French influences.

VILLA PLINIANA, LAKE COMO

The Naviglio, the canal which flows through Milan and sends various branches to the Ticino and the Adda, was formerly lined for miles beyond the city with suburban villas. Few remain unaltered, and even of these few the old gardens have disappeared. One of the most interesting houses in Del Rè’s collection, the Villa Alario (now Visconti di Saliceto), on the Naviglio near Cernusco, is still in perfect preservation without and within; and though its old gardens were replaced by an English park early in the nineteenth century, their general outline is still discoverable. The villa, a stately pile built by Ruggieri in 1736, looks on a court divided from the highway by a fine wall and beautiful iron gates. Low wings containing the chapel and offices, and running at right angles to the main building, connect the latter with the courtyard walls; and arched passages through the centre of the wings lead to outlying courts surrounded by stables and other dependencies. The house, toward the forecourt, has a central open loggia or atrium, and the upper windows are framed in baroque architraves and surmounted by square attic lights. The garden elevation is more elaborate. Here there is a central projection, three windows wide, flanked by two-storied open loggias, and crowned by an attic with ornamental pilasters and urns. This central bay is adorned with beautiful wrought-iron balconies, which are repeated in the wings at each end of the building. All the wrought-iron of the Villa Visconti is remarkable for its elegance and originality, and as used on the terraces, and in the balustrade of the state staircase, in combination with heavy baroque stone balusters, it is an interesting example of a peculiarly Lombard style of decoration.

Between the house and the Naviglio there once lay an elaborate parterre de broderie, terminated above the canal by a balustraded retaining-wall adorned with statues, and flanked on each side by pleached walks, arbours, trellis-work and fish-ponds. Of this complicated pleasance little remains save the long terraces extending from each end of the house, the old flower-garden below one of these, and some bits of decorative sculpture incorporated in the boundary-walls. The long tank or canal shown in Del Rè’s print has been turned into an irregular pond with grass-banks, and the parterre de broderie is now a lawn; even the balustrade has been removed from the wall along the Naviglio. Still, the architectural details of the forecourt and the terraces are worthy of careful study, and the unusual beauty of the old villa, with its undisturbed group of dependencies, partly atones for the loss of its original surroundings.

IRON GATES OF THE VILLA ALARIO| (NOW VISCONTI DI SALICETO)

Many eighteenth-century country houses in the style of the Villa Visconti are scattered through the Milanese, though few have retained so unaltered an outline, or even such faint traces of their formal gardens. The huge villa of the Duke of Modena at Varese—now the Municipio—is a good example of the same architecture, and has a beautiful stone-and-iron balustrade and many wrought-iron balconies in the same style as those at Cernusco; and its gardens, ascending the hillside behind the house, and now used as a public park, must once have been very fine. The Grand Hôtel of Varese is also an old villa, and its architectural screen and projecting wings form an unusually characteristic façade of the same period. Here, again, little remains of the old garden but a charming upper terrace; but the interior decorations of many of the rooms are undisturbed, and are exceptionally interesting examples of the more delicate Italian baroque.

Another famous country house, Castellazzo d’Arconate, at Bollate, is even more palatial than the Duke of Modena’s villa at Varese, and, while rather heavy in general outline, has an interesting interior façade, with a long arcade resting on coupled columns, and looking out over a stately courtyard with statues. This villa is said to have preserved a part of its old gardens, but it is difficult of access, and could not be visited at the time when the material for these chapters was collected.