Nine books of letters written for publication by a Roman senator and lawyer, two of which describe his own villas and their gardens room by room: the fullest picture of a Roman garden to survive, and the text the Renaissance read when it set out to rebuild the ancient villa.
Pliny the Younger (c. AD 61–c. 113) was the nephew and adopted son of the elder Pliny, the naturalist who died at Vesuvius in AD 79. He was a consul under Trajan and later governor of Bithynia. His letters were edited by himself, nine books of them, with a tenth of official correspondence with the emperor published after his death.
Two letters are descriptions of his houses. Letter II.17, to Gallus, describes the Laurentine villa on the coast south of Ostia, which he used in winter; letter V.6, to Domitius Apollinaris, describes his summer villa in Tuscany, below the Apennines near Tifernum Tiberinum in the upper Tiber valley. The Tuscan letter is the garden text. In front of the portico lies a terrace with beds edged in box and figures of animals clipped in box facing each other; below it a slope with more box figures and a walk among clipped evergreens; and beside the house a garden in the form of a hippodrome, ringed by plane trees hung with ivy, where box is cut into many shapes, some of them letters spelling the owner’s name and the gardener’s, with little obelisks of box among fruit trees and a marble dining couch shaded by a vine, with jets of water and a basin on which the dishes float.
No trace of either villa had been securely identified when the Renaissance read these letters, and the descriptions were reconstructed on paper again and again, by Scamozzi among others, and in the eighteenth century by Robert Castell (The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated, 1728). The public-domain English version of William Melmoth (1746), revised by W. M. L. Hutchinson for the Loeb Library (1915), is the one most often reprinted. Excavations from the 1980s have found the Tuscan villa at San Giustino, near Città di Castello.
The book, part by part
I Letter II.17: the Laurentine villa
A winter villa by the sea: an atrium, a D-shaped portico, dining rooms looking on three sides at the water, a covered walk (cryptoporticus), a terrace scented with violets, and a kitchen garden with fig and mulberry trees.
II Letter V.6: the Tuscan villa
The setting in an amphitheatre of hills; the south front and its portico; the terrace with box animals; the clipped walk; the hippodrome garden with its plane trees, its box cut into letters and shapes, and the marble couch and fountain.
III Letter IX.7: the villas on Lake Como
Two houses called Tragedy and Comedy, one on a height above the lake, one on the shore, contrasted for their views.