Description
The body of the main building has simple features but is embellished with pilasters and string courses made more evident by the contrasting colours. The villa has three floors. Its façade, facing the valley, is embellished with a rectangular tympanum which includes a sundial and statues. Of particular impact is the central hallway from which one can enjoy a view of the avenue of pine trees and, from the opposite side, the valley below. To the rear are two buildings, once used as stables, in a simple but harmonious style, and the chapel rebuilt at a later date. Next to the main building are also two constructions once used as dwellings for the gardener and servants. Of these two buildings, the one on the left retains a remarkable portal and the plastered surface is decorated with a band of festoons, ribbons and fleurons painted in chiaroscuro.
The park is in a romantic style, with a marked tendency towards the picturesque, as shown by the rich use of rocks to build false caves, false mounds, pseudo-rustic retaining walls and false ruins. The dirt paths in the park are twisting, often flanked by stone and dry-laid pebble walls and marked by a dense network of ducts in fired bricks that used to supply rainwater to cisterns (still existing, though buried). The paths in the sloping woodland lead to areas with benches, a tower-monkey cage, a false cave, a large icehouse disguised as a cave, a false mound, a regular flowerbed bordered by a tall box hedge and a belvedere with a terrace. The focal point of the design is the dirt forecourt in front of the villa, bordered on one side by a belvedere obtained by terracing and on the other two sides by two roads at right angles to one another, one leading to the monument to Mereghi (the obelisk) and the other, passing through two symmetrical buildings with a richly ornamented façade, to the villa on the opposite hill, then belonging to the same family.
A third axis is constituted by the current main dirt access road to the villa, flanked by regular woods of bamboo or palm trees. The path towards the obelisk still exists today, and is highlighted by a double row of centuries-old domestic pines, while that towards villa Pieralisi stops at the fence of the orchard. The orchard-vegetable garden was built on land enclosed external brick and mortar walls and railings or gates. It was supplied with water by a well with a cast-iron hand pump, and surrounded by small service or ornamental buildings that are now partly ruined. The orchard, and the farmhouses belonging to the villa, on the edge of a stone pavement, are evidence of the strong relationship between the villa and the surrounding cultivated countryside. The palms, bamboos, bergeria, Lirope muscari, Ruscus hypoglossum and other exotic species show the preference for exotic plants, a preference also shown by a system of greenhouses and heated seedbeds which is now profoundly altered.
Location
Villa Colle Olivo, Jesi
Information
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