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1904 1st edition in excellent condition with illustrations from Maxfield Parrish. The book is primarily a learned survey of garden architecture and ornamentation rather than a study of the villas. We may imagine Wharton visiting the gardens in 1903 with a scholar's eye, detecting, beneath the palimpsest of eighteenth-century horticulturists bent on transforming every garden into an English park, the original garden outlines and plantings. She sketches the history of the villas, most of which were built during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Her mission is to evoke, for the reader, the original tripartite relationship between villa, garden, and surrounding landscape. Wharton was disappointed that the Century Company refused to include detailed plans of each garden, a defect noted by early reviewers, which would have undoubtedly clarified much of the text. The book contains descriptions of more than 75 villas and their gardens; Wharton is careful to point out that "villa," in Italian, connotes both house and pleasure-grounds rather than the house alone (IV 54). The volume has a bibliography of reference works in four languages, capsule biographies of 55 architects and landscape gardeners of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and a detailed index. As was the case with most of Wharton's travel books, serial publication preceded compilation of the book. In addition to the introduction and four chapters discussed below, there are chapters on Sienese villas, Genoese villas, and Roman villas.
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