Review: La Villa, by Bartolomeo Taegio and Thomas E. Beck

Abstract

Bartolomeo Taegio and Thomas E. Beck. La Villa . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, 298 pp., 6 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9780812243178. Thomas Beck’s critical edition of Bartolomeo Taegio’s La Villa is an important addition to the body of published primary sources of landscape architectural theory. Beck offers the first English translation of a well-known Italian treatise that was first published in 1559 in Milan by Francesco Moscheni. The book presents a broad picture of the advantages of rural life in sixteenth-century Lombardy in the form of a dialogue between two gentlemen, Vitauro and Partenio. Vitauro, in whose voice we recognize Taegio’s own, maintains the superiority of rural life compared to urban life. He tries to persuade Partenio to leave Milan and settle in the country. One of the benefits, Vitauro argues, of living in the countryside is the pursuit of otium , or honorable leisure, which involves indulging in reading and writing and engaging in learned conversations without any of the distractions that are typical of the urban environment. The dialectic of rural otium and urban negotium was certainly not new at the time Taegio was writing. Fifteen years earlier it was the dominating theme of another work on villa life published in Venice, Alberto Lollio’s Lettera…nella quale … egli celebra la villa e lauda molto l’agricoltura . Taegio, however, as Beck points out in the introduction, distances himself from both his contemporaries and predecessors by separating the villa from its agricultural context, as when he makes Vitauro “defer the discussion of agriculture to a more convenient occasion” (22). Unlike other contemporary contributors to villa literature, such as Giuseppe Falcone and Agostino …