Andrea Palladio · The First Book
Chapter XXII. Of pavements and cielings
HAVING seen the forms of the loggia’s, halls, and rooms, it is proper to speak of their pavements and ceilings.
The pavements are usually made either of terrazzo, as is used in Vice, bricks or live stones. Those terrazzi are excellent which are made of pounded bricks, and small gravel, and lime of river pebbles, or the paduan, well pounded; and ought to be made in spring or in summer, that they may be well dry'd.
The brick floors, because the bricks may be made of divers forms and of divers colours by reason of the diversity of the chalks, will be very agreeable and beautiful to the eye.
Those of live stones are very seldom made in chambers, because they are exceeding cold in winter; but they do very well in the loggia’s and publick places,
IT is to be observed, that the chambers which are one behind the other must have their floors even, and in such a manner that the thresholds of the doors be not higher than the remaining part of the chamber-floor; and if any little room or closet should not join with its height to that mark, a mezato or false floor ought to be made upon it.
The ceilings are also diversly made, because many take delight to have them of beautiful and well-wrought beams. Where it js necessary to observe, that these beams ought to be distant one from another one thickness and a half of the beam, because the ceilings appear thus very beautiful to the eve, and there remains so much of the wall between the ends of the beams, that it is more able to sustain what is over it. But if they are made more distant, they'll not be an agreeable sight; and if they are made less, it will be in a manner dividing the wall above from that below, whereupon, the beams being rotted or burnt, the upper wall must be ruined.
Oturrsare for having compartments of ofjiucco, or of wood, in which pictures are placed; and thus being adorn’d according to different inventions, therefore in this no certain and determinate rule can be given.
Public-domain text (London, published by Isaac Ware, 1738). Read from the Internet Archive’s scan (gri_33125011569684) of the copy in the Getty Research Institute, by way of Wikimedia Commons, where it is marked public domain. That scan’s text layer had lost the ends of the lines on every left-hand page, so the pages were read again from the scan’s images, the two readings compared word by word, and the text cleaned: the long s (ſ) is printed s and the ct and st ligatures as plain letters, words broken at the ends of lines are joined, and running heads, page numbers, signatures and catchwords are removed. Ware’s spelling, capitals and punctuation are otherwise kept (shew, publick, antient, compleat). Chapter titles and words the OCR misread were corrected against the page images. Some misreadings will remain, most of them in the italic prefaces and the Latin of Book III. Ware’s dedication, the list of subscribers, his table of terms, the errata and the bookseller’s advertisement are not reproduced. Nor are the 212 engraved plates, their inscriptions, or the keys to the letters on them that Ware prints in the text: where Palladio writes “as in the design” the figure is in the printed book.