ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the portico and its decorative program as a cultural phenomenon in Renaissance Italy. It examines the spatial characteristics of these semi-interior spaces and their social and cultural functions, contextualizing them within the classical, medieval, and early Renaissance traditions. It emphasizes the spatial ambiguity shared by porticoes, loggias, and pergolas, which blended indoors with outdoors and served as mediating spaces between two distinct worlds or states of being, "inside" and "outside". The book highlights the importance of real pergolas, which became a central component of villa gardens from this period and developed a sophisticated design rich with meaning. It emphasizes the habit of mixing myth and science in the natural history discourse of the time, a tendency that extends to the representation of flora and fauna in the illusionistic pergolas.