Build the country house by a navigable river if you can, for cheap transport of the harvest and for beauty, or else by a main road; on raised ground open to the air, away from standing water and deep valleys, and in the middle of its own land.
Roads raised and planted with trees
Make the roads outside a city straight, broad and raised above the fields, and plant trees along both sides, to shade the traveller and delight the eye.
Palladio’s models are the Roman consular roads, the Appian and Flaminian ways, raised on embankments with milestones and stone seats. The Venetian mainland of his day was being drained and reorganised into great estates, and its straight roads and canals lined with trees still frame the villas.
Related rules
Put the owner’s house at the centre and join the farm buildings to it with covered porticoes (barchesse), so that one can go everywhere under cover; give granaries, cellars, stables and threshing floor their proper places, in proportion to the estate.
Make the streets of a city straight and wide enough for their traffic; pave the middle for carts and animals and raise the sides a little for people on foot, and where the climate is hot or wet, line them with porticoes so that citizens go about their business under cover.
Leave piazzas in several parts of the city for markets and assembly, the principal one in the middle; ring it with porticoes, and set round it the palace of the prince or the signoria, the treasury, the prisons and the basilica where justice is done, with the principal church close by.
breadth : length = 2 : 3 (the Latin forum)
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Roads raised and planted with trees”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/palladio-roads-trees. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.