villa, country estate, complete with house, grounds, and subsidiary buildings. The termvilla particularly applies to the suburban summer residences of the ancient Romans and their later Italian imitators. In Great Britain the word has come to mean a small detached or semidetached suburban home. In theUnited States it generally refers to asumptuous suburban or country residence.

Many villas existed throughout theRoman Empire, and references to them are common in the works of Roman writers, especiallyCicero, who had seven villas, andPliny the Younger, who described at great length in his letters his villas inTuscany and near Laurentum. The Italian countryside is dotted with ruins of innumerable villas. The most famous of these isHadrian’s Villa at Tivoli (c.ad 120–130), which was a sumptuous imperial residence with parks and gardens on a grand scale. The uneven terrain made necessary large flights of steps and terraces. The buildings, which covered an area about 2 miles (3 km) in length, were echoes of celebrated structures the emperor had seen in his travels.

Roman villas frequently wereasymmetrical in plan and were built with elaborate terracing on hillsides; they had long colonnades, towers, fine water gardens with reflecting pools and fountains, and extensive reservoirs forwater supply. According to Pliny there were two kinds of villas, thevilla urbana, which was a country seat with city comforts, and thevilla rustica, the farmhouse in which the principal room was the kitchen, with the bakery and stables beyond, and room for winepresses, oil presses, hand mills, and so on.

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Architecture: The Built World

During the Middle Ages villas were abandoned, and in some places castles and monasteries were built in and on top of them. The greatRenaissance villas were also occasionally built on their ruins and frequently used some of the better-preserved remains as models. This influence is evident in the Villa Madama (c. 1520) just outside Rome, designed by Raphael, and inPirro Ligorio’s Casino ofPius IV (c. 1558–62) in the Vatican gardens.Renaissance villas sought, however, greatersymmetry than those of antiquity, and the houses were less rambling (frequently being remodeled castles, especially in Tuscany), though thegardens were often even more elaborate. In fact, the garden often became the principal element in the 16th- and 17th-century villa, as in theVilla d’Este in Tivoli (1550), also designed by Ligorio. Other important examples include the Villa di Papa Giulio (1550) in Rome and the Villa Farnese (1559–73) at Caprarola, both by Giacomo da Vignola; the Villa Aldobrandini (1598–1603) at Frascati; the Villa Barberini atCastel Gandolfo (on the site of a villa of the emperor Domitian); theBoboli Gardens (begun 1550) in Florence; the Villa Barbaro (1555–59) at Maser in the Veneto and the Villa Rotonda (1550–51) by Andrea Palladio; and the villasBorghese (1613–16), Medici (c. 1540), and Doria Pamphili (1650) in Rome. By the 18th and 19th centuries, villas in Italy were less extensive, though fine ones continued to be built, especially in the Piedmont, Lombardy, the Venetia, and around Rome and Naples.

In the mid-19th centuryeclecticRomantic architects often adopted a modified Italian villa style as a model for country and town houses in Germany, England, and the United States. These were usually characterized by flat roofs, broadly projecting eaves supported on brackets, square towers, and arcaded or colonnaded piazzas.