In and out of Florence; a new introduction to a well-known city . climbing roses; andgives from every yard of its way the most wonderfulviews of the Arno and Florence in its hill-rimmed villa was formerly a group of three contadinos(farmers) houses, which through the persistent andexpensive efforts of two successive English ownershave been merged into one. One can pick out theoriginal units with some accuracy by standing on theroof-terrace and attending to the levels and directionsof the various parts of the tiled roof. But themerger of the houses has been a successful one andthere are
In and out of Florence; a new introduction to a well-known city . climbing roses; andgives from every yard of its way the most wonderfulviews of the Arno and Florence in its hill-rimmed villa was formerly a group of three contadinos(farmers) houses, which through the persistent andexpensive efforts of two successive English ownershave been merged into one. One can pick out theoriginal units with some accuracy by standing on theroof-terrace and attending to the levels and directionsof the various parts of the tiled roof. But themerger of the houses has been a successful one andthere are no indications of faction or falling apartof the original trio. One of them, at least, is ofdecent age, as a sort of cornerstone is inscribed 1639. An inscribed plate put up by his nephew onthe highway side of the house attests that in one ofthem lived, a generation or two ago, a painter of somenote, one Malatesta. The wife of this nephew is nowour teacher of Italian, and thus do we curiously main-tain the association of our villa with the family Our Villa 21 The three-in-one house is long and sinuous. Longis surely the right name for a house with one hundredand sixty feet of running length and less than twenty-five feet of width in its widest and but seventeen inits narrowest part. What I mean by sinuosity in ourhouse is its curious habit of following the curve ofthe road along which it extends its ten rods of length;inside it doesnt seem exactly to curve, but an analysisof the many little offsets and insets in the roadsidewall, and the total lack, of correspondence of thelongitudinal partitions, show how the fitting of thehouse to the curving road has been the house wall is the actual boundary of thehighway it is given two special means of keeping outthe noise, of which there isnt much anyway, and thedust, of which there is less. These are, first, a com-parative absence of windows, and second, an unusualthickness. The walls are, of course, as ar
Size: 1246px × 2006px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookidinoutofflore, bookyear1910
