‘Shortly before his death in 1926, Rainer Maria Rilke, a great lover of landscape and architecture, asked a question: “Earth, is it not this that you want: to/rise/ invisibly in us?” (Duino Elegies, 1923).
In the villa tradition, both in antiquity and at least since the 15th century, the ancient link between beauty and goodness remained more or less explicit. Riffing on Virgil’s exultation of natural poetics in The Georgics, Petrarch took great delight in the twin meaning of cultivation: cultivation of selfhood and of the land. This is one reason why the villa became important in the Renaissance as a locus amoneus.