ABSTRACT
Returning to France in 1929 on the steamer Lutetia, the architect Le Corbusier prepared for publication ten lectures on architecture and urbanism that he had given in Buenos Aires. To find a parallel to Palladio's urbane view of a rural retreat one must look further, forward almost a century to the letters of the younger Pliny. Two of Pliny's villas — one on the coast of Latium, the other in Tuscany — are each the subject of two long, detailed and famous letters. The parallel responses of the two architects to site and views are clear, but to make the comparison more telling, Colin Rowe seized on what for him was Le Corbusier's key phrase: 'un reve virgilien'. Pliny described all the pleasures of the two villas, the architecture as well as the landscape. Literary association is not, though, the main thrust of Rowe's argument.
