Andrea Palladio · The Fourth Book
Chapter XXIII. Of the temple of Vesta
AT Tivoli, sixteen miles distant from Rome, upon the fall of the river Auiene, now
called Teverone, the following round temple is to be seen, which the inhabitants of these places say was the room of the Sihilla Tiburtina: Which opinion is without any foundation. However I believe (for the reasons beforementioned) that it was a temple dedicated to the goddess Vesta.
This temple is of the Corinthian order. The intercolumniations are of two diameters, Its pavement is raised from the ground the third part of the length of the columns. The’ bases have no plinth, that the place to walk in under the portico might be more free and ample. The columns are as long costly as the cell is broad, and they incline inwardly towards the wall of the cell; so that the shaft of the column above falls perpendicularly upon the shaft of the column below in the inward part,
The capitals are exceedingly well made, and are wrought in the manner of olive leaves; I therefore believe that it was built in good times. Its door, and the windows, are narrower in the upper part than in the lower, as Vitruvius teacheth they ought to be made, in the sixth chapter of the fourth book.
An this temple is of pier tiburtina covered with a very light stucco, hence it appears to be made of marble. I wave made four plates of this temple. In the first the plan is designed. Plate In the second the elevation. Plate In the third are the members of the portico. Plate In the fourth are designed the ornaments of the door and of the windows. Plate Tue fascia’s of the ornaments of the door, and of the windows, are different from the others that are usually made, Tue astragals, that are under the cimacia’s, project beyond the said cimacia’s; a thing I have never seen in other ornaments.
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.