Andrea Palladio · The Third Book
Chapter XVIII. Of the Piazze of the Romans
THE Romans, and the Italians (as Vitruvius says in the above-mentioned place)
departing from the custom of the Greeks, made their piazze longer than they were broad; so that the length being divided into three parts, two were given to the breadth, because of the gratuities in them made to the gladiators. ‘This form was much more com-~ modious for that purpose than the square one; and for this reason also they made the intercolumniations of the portico’s, that were round the piazze, of two diameters and a quarter | p q of a column, or of three diameters, that the sight of the people might not be obstructed by the closeness of the columns. The portico’s were as broad as the columns were long, and they had bankers shops under them. The columns above were made one fourth part let y p! p than those below, because the under parts, with respect to the weight they bear, ought to be firmer than those above, as was said in the first book. In the part facing the hottest region of the heaven they placed the basilica, which I have marked in the design of these piazze, two squares in length; and in the part within there are portico’s round it, the third part of the space in the middle in breadth. Their columns are as long as the place is broad, and they may be made of the most acceptable order.
In the part facing the north, I have placed there the curia, one square and an half in length; its height is half the length and breadth put together. This was the place-(as I have said above) where the senate met to consult about matters of state
C, Portico's, and the little court on one side of the basilica. E {72 places for the bankers, and for the most honourable arts of the city. F, Is the place for the secretaries, whither the deliberations of the finale were
remitted,
basilica. Ar the said parts are made by a larger sale, and countermarked with the same letters. Tur elevation that follows in a large form, is of one part of the portico’s of the piazze.
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.