Villa Farnese
He had designs made for a fortified castle or rocca by the architects Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Baldassare Peruzzi.
Subsequently, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a grandson of Pope Paul III, and a man who was known for promoting his family's interests, planned to turn this partly constructed fortified edifice into a villa or country house.
Vignola, the architect chosen for this difficult and inhospitable site, had recently proved his mettle in designing Villa Giulia on the outskirts of Rome for the preceding pope, Julius III.
[5] In the galleried court, paired Ionic columns flank niches containing busts of the Roman Emperors, above a rusticated arcade, a reworking of Bramante's scheme for the "House of Raphael", in the Borgo rione, Rome.
This basement floor in the foundations, which functioned as a carriage entrance in inclement weather, features a massive central column with a series of buttresses and retaining walls; on the exterior, large heavily grilled doors in the rusticated walls appear to lead into the guardrooms of a fortress, while above them a curved balustraded external double stairway leads to the terrace above.
This in turn has a formal double staircase to the principal entrance on the Piano dei Prelati floor which is accessed from the broad terrace.
To either side of the loggia are two circular rooms: one is the chapel, the other accommodates the principal staircase or Scala Regia, a graceful spiral of steps supported by pairs of Ionic columns rising up through three floors and frescoed by Antonio Tempesta.
[7] The scrupulous symmetrical balance of the two apartments is carried through by their matching parterre gardens, each reached by a bridge across the moat and cut into the hillslope.
The Flemish painters Joos van Winghe and Bartholomaeus Spranger assisted il Bertoia with the decorations in the rooms he had been commissioned to finish.
[12] The casino is approached by stairs contained between heavily rusticated grotto walls, with a central catena d'acqua, a cascaded rill or 'water-staircase', which the water flows down to a stone basin.
1920s gardens with a catena d'acqua include the Harold Lloyd Estate in Beverly Hills and 'Las Tejas' in Montecito, California, with the latter also having a casino in direct homage to the original at Villa Farnese.
[13] The villa Farnese in Caprarola provided the model for the Pentagon in Washington D.C.[14] Today the casino and its gardens are one of the homes of the President of the Italian Republic.
The numerous rooms, salons and halls with their marbles and frescoes, and the architecture of the great palazzo-like villa are still as impressive and daunting as they were first intended to be.
The casino’s southern side garden staircase with water cascade (catena d'acqua) and fountain at the bottom were the ones in the scene of Romeo and Juliet separation at dawn after their first night together.
