Villa

A villa was originally a Roman country house built for the upper class. According to Pliny, there were two kinds of villas, the villa urbana, which was a country seat that could be reached from Rome (or another city), and the villa rustica, the farm-house estate, occupied by the servants who had charge generally of the estate. There were a concentration of Imperial villas near the Bay of Naples, especially on the Isle of Capri, at Monte Circeo on the coast and at Antium (Anzio). Wealthy Romans escaped the summer heat in the hills round Rome, especially around Frascati (cf Hadrian's Villa). Cicero is said to have possessed no less than seven villas, the oldest of which was near Arpinum, which he inherited. Pliny the Younger had three or four, of which the example near Laurentium is the best known from his descriptions.

Roman writers refer with satisfaction to the self-sufficiency of their villas, where they drank their own wine and pressed their own oil, a symptom of the increasing economic fragmentation of the Roman empire. When complete working villas were donated to the Christian church, they served as the basis for monasteries that survived the disruptions of the Gothic War and the Lombards. An outstanding example of such a villa-turned-monastery was Montecassino.

In post-Roman times a villa referred to a self-sufficient, usually fortified Italian or Gallo-Roman farmstead. It was economically as self-sufficient as a village and its inhabitants, who might be legally tied to it as serfs were villeins. The Merovingian Franks inherited the concept, but the later French term was basti or bastide.

In 14th and 15th century Italy, a 'villa' once more connoted a country house, sometimes the family seat of power like Villa Caprarola, more often designed for seasonal pleasure, usually located within easy distance of a city. The Villa d'Este near Tivoli is famous for the water play in its terraced gardens. The Villa Medici was on the edge of Rome, on the Pincian Hill, when it was built in 1540. In the later 16th century the Palladian villas designed by Andrea Palladio round Vicenza and along the Brenta Canal in Venetian territories, remained influential for over two hundred years. Palladio often unified all the farmbuildings into the architecture of his extended villas (as at Villa Emo). Other famous Italian villas are the Villa Madama, the design of which, attributed to Raphael, was carried out by Giulio Romano in 1520; the Villa Albani, near the Porta Salaria; the Villa Borghese with its famous gardens; the Villa Doria Pamphili (1650); the Villa Giulia of Pope Julius II (1550), designed by Vignola. The cool hills of Frascati gained the Villa Aldobrandini (1592); the Villa Falconieri and the Villa Montdragon.

In the early 18th century the English took up the term. Soon neo-palladian villas dotted the valley of the River Thames. In many ways Thomas Jefferson's Monticello is a villa. In the 19th century villa was extended to describe any suburban house that was free-standing in a landscaped plot of ground, as opposed to a 'terrace' of joined houses. By the time 'semi-detached villas' were being erected at the turn of the 20th century, the term collapsed under its extension and overuse. The suburban 'villa' became a bungalow after World War I.