The Tuscan Villa Style  ......

A Short History of the Florentine Villa..

The type of Villa style that we have concentrated on over the years is more a product of centuries of evolving architecture than that of an exact period.  Specifically, it is about an architecture that begins in the Dark Ages with the Tuscan farmhouse and transforms between the years 1450 and 1550 to a Renaissance Villa.  A description of the circumstances that created these wonderful houses is necessary before the essential elements of the style can be understood, what follows is a brief history of the place and times.

The Villa & Vigne..

The term “Villa” is a shortened version of the word “Villeggiatura”, a latin/Italian term, which approximates the English phrase “summer vacation”.  Since the times of the Caesars, Romans recognized that the sweltering summer in the heart of most Italian cities was not a healthy place.  The great cities of Florence and Rome were literally built upon swamplands, creating a steaming breading ground for insects and bacteria.   The typical ancient walled city had polluted water supplies, was cramped and poorly ventilated.  In these conditions, the summer heat became an incubator for malaria, cholera and typhoid.   To protect ones family, it became customary for people of wealth to move their families out of the cities during the summer months to a healthier environment.    As early as the 1st century B.C. Julius Caesar traveled to his summer villa on the shores of Lago Como in the North of Italy to get away from the cramped city of Rome.   By the middle ages the villeggiatura had become a way of life in Florence for the expanding merchant class.   They soon began to acquire a great many of the rural dwellings in the countryside around Florence as second homes.   

 The villa of the middle ages was usually nothing more than a traditional farmhouse.  In Tuscany that meant, fortress-like structures, usually three stories in height with the lower floor set aside for protecting animals at night. There were very few wall openings and often these homes were attached to towers (campanile) that provided ventilation and an observation point to scan for the, not infrequent, vandals or approaching armies.   However, these farm houses were built on sunny, well-ventilated sites with healthier water supplies and were usually perched well above the swamps of the cities.  The expanding villeggiatura caused many to be transformed.  The ritual of gathering the family together in the summer at a safe, clean location became an endearing part of gentrified Tuscan life.  This annual pilgrimage of family and friends transformed the farm homes into treasured heirlooms that were handed down from father to son over generations.  The rural nature of the villas remained, but their farming theme began to change, as many merchants began to try their hand at winemaking.  By luck or providence the seasonal migration coincided with the season for cultivation of the grape.  The practice of growing grapes and crushing ones own wine became such a common part of villa life that the summer villa eventually became known as “vigne”. (Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, 1979 Princeton Press)  Cultivation of the great wines of Tuscany developed at this time probably helped by the fact that thousands of new “gentlemen farmers” began to perfect their own family cru’s.  No doubt the new vintners created some friendly annual competition, which added to the villa way of life.    These farm dwellings remained, for the most part rural, simple farmhouses turned vineyard, until the economic upturn of the Renaissance.    

 Vitruvius, Bracciolini and the Renaissance

In the early 1400th century the Florentine merchants, bankers and the Medici family brought great prosperity and importance to the City of Florence. With their new power and wealth the Florentine upper class began a movement to rediscover the glory and architecture of the Roman Empire.   At this time the city of Rome had lain in rubble for more than a thousand years after the “Fall” in 476 A.D.  The buildings and monuments were unrecognizable but the glory of Rome was well known and the heaps of architectural debris scattered around Italy showed some of the grandeur that had been Roman architecture.  Historians suggest the research was largely an egotistical act carried out to lift the Florentine noblemen of the 15th century to be the leaders of a “New Roman Empire”.  A first start for this rebirth would be the recreation of the architecture of Rome in their new palaces, town halls and villas.  After some decades of digging and searching through the ruins, a document was discovered that transforms architecture to this day.  In 1414 a young Florentine named Poggio Bracciolini, while excavating in the Forum, stumbled upon a 1st century treatise titled De architectura, or The Ten Books on Architecture.  “The Books”, as they are known, were written by the Roman Architect, “Vitruvius”, in the 1st century BC.   “The Books” were a virtual “how-to”, describing in detail the essential architecture, engineering and philosophy used to create the great works of Roman architecture.  They delineate the ancient “orders” of the Greeks and Romans.  They describe the secrets of Roman proportions of arches, columns, capitols, entablabtures and more.   Although written in the first century BC, it is believed “The Books” were used for 400 years to create the thousands of cities, monuments and civil works of ancient Rome. “The Books” remain today as the only surviving written document describing the elements of ancient Greek and Roman architecture.    

The Books were kept hidden for some time but by 1450 the famous Florentine architect, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) published his own illustrated version of the “Books”, titled "De re aedificatoria".  With the publication of his treatise and the many re-publications thereafter, the Classical Architectural Period of the 1500th century had begun.  That period we know now as the Renaissance.    In and around Florence, every villa, palace and municipal structure was soon adorned with the facades of ancient Rome.  In the Tuscan hills the venerable “vigne” began to evolve.  The fortress farmhouse of the Dark Ages was soon opened up with perfectly proportioned triple arches executed in the ancient Tuscan Order.  Simple raftered eaves were being wrapped in classical entablatures. With this classical revival the Renaissance Villa style was born.   

The Villa style is a mixture of centuries of architectural and social development.  It is the campanile that reminds us of our feudal past alongside the proportions of an exactly sculpted Corinthian column.  It is an asymmetrical building with countless additions added by generations of family in any number of Tuscan variations.   But the style is always tied together by the natural elements of the Tuscan hills.   The orange-red tile roofs made of Tuscan mud covered every variation of this architecture.  The ochre colored stucco, mined from local clays, adorn palace and farmhouse alike.  Travertine marble, whether used as structural beam in a farmhouse or for Renaissance decoration, is found everywhere.   Local craftsmanship forge the wrought iron bars of farmhouses, as well as, the elaborate rails of the Medici villas.  The design of an Italian Villa, which contains these enduring elements of Tuscan life and architecture, is a rather long and arduous process but the creation of “vigne” that becomes part of a family’s history has its own rewards.               

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