Harris, Dianne

Italian villas are generally regarded as beautiful havens where a privileged elite, fleeing the harsh realities of the city, found peace and harmony amid buildings and gardens framed upon classical ideals of proportion, balance, and the natural. In her interdisciplinary book, Dianne Harris presents a radically different view of villa life as it developed during the eighteenth century on the vast estates dominating the fertile Lombard plain. Governed from Vienna by a Habsburg regime bent upon increased tax revenues, the great landowning families lived lives fraught with tensions and contradicti...