Villa

After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became small farming compounds, which were increasingly fortified in Late Antiquity, sometimes transferred to the Church for reuse as a monastery.

In the early modern period, any comfortable detached house with a garden near a city or town was likely to be described as a villa; most survivals have now been engulfed by suburbia.

Not included as villae were the domus, city houses for the élite and privileged classes, and the insulae, blocks of apartment buildings for the rest of the population.

Not far from this noble place, which was already popular with the Romans because of its favorable microclimate, one of the most important Villa Maritima of its time, the Miramare Castle, was built in the 19th century.

[4] Wealthy Romans also escaped the summer heat in the hills round Rome, especially around Tibur (Tivoli and Frascati), such as at Hadrian's Villa.

Like their Italian counterparts, they were complete working agrarian societies of fields and vineyards, perhaps even tileworks or quarries, ranged round a high-status power centre with its baths and gardens.

In regions on the Continent, aristocrats and territorial magnates donated large working villas and overgrown abandoned ones to individual monks; these might become the nuclei of monasteries.

In this way, the Italian villa system of late Antiquity survived into the early Medieval period in the form of monasteries that withstood the disruptions of the Gothic War (535–554) and the Lombards.

About 529 Benedict of Nursia established his influential monastery of Monte Cassino in the ruins of a villa at Subiaco that had belonged to Nero.

Villa/Vila (or its cognates) is part of many Spanish and Portuguese placenames, like Vila Real and Villadiego: a villa/vila is a town with a charter (fuero or foral) of lesser importance than a ciudad/cidade ("city").

The Quattrocento villa gardens were treated as a fundamental and aesthetic link between a residential building and the outdoors, with views over a humanized agricultural landscape, at that time the only desirable aspect of nature.

He employed Carlo Fontana, pupil of Gian Lorenzo Bernini to transform the villa and dramatic gardens in a Roman Baroque style by 1680.

In the later 16th century in the northeastern Italian Peninsula the Palladian villas of the Veneto, designed by Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), were built in Vicenza in the Republic of Venice.

Soon after in Greenwich England, following his 1613–1615 Grand Tour, Inigo Jones designed and built the Queen's House between 1615 and 1617 in an early Palladian architecture style adaptation in another country.

The Palladian villa style renewed its influence in different countries and eras and remained influential for over four hundred years, with the Neo-Palladian a part of the late 17th century and on Renaissance Revival architecture period.

Thanks to the revival of interest in Palladio and Inigo Jones, soon Neo-Palladian villas dotted the valley of the River Thames and English countryside.

[8] In many ways the late 18th century Monticello, by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, United States is a Palladian Revival villa.

A later revival, in the Gilded Age and early 20th century, produced The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, Filoli in Woodside, California, and Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.; by architects-landscape architects such as Richard Morris Hunt, Willis Polk, and Beatrix Farrand.

In the nineteenth century, the term villa was extended to describe any large suburban house that was free-standing in a landscaped plot of ground.

In the 20th century International Style villas were designed by Roberto Burle Marx, Oscar Niemeyer, Luis Barragán, and other architects developing a unique Euro-Latin synthesized aesthetic.

In New Zealand, "villa" refers almost exclusively to Victorian and Edwardian wooden weatherboard houses mainly built between 1880 and 1914, characterised by high ceilings (often 3.7 m or 12 ft), sash windows, and a long entrance hall.

[18] In Cambodia, "villa" is used as a loanword in the local language of Khmer, and is generally used to describe any type of detached townhouse that features yard space.

The term does not apply to any particular architectural style or size, the only features that distinguish a Khmer villa from another building are the yard space and being fully detached.