hird or uppermost story;
and these steps are all supported by double columns with cornices, which
curve in a round in accordance with the staircase. The whole is a rich
and well-varied work, beginning with the Doric Order, and continuing in
the Ionic, the Corinthian, and the Composite, with a wealth of
balusters, niches, and other fanciful ornaments, which make it a rare
thing, and most beautiful. Opposite to this staircase--namely, at the
other of the corners that are one on either side of the above-mentioned
loggia of the entrance--there is a suite of rooms that begins in a
circular vestibule equal in breadth to the staircase, and leads to a
great hall on the ground floor, eighty palms long and forty broad. This
hall is wrought in stucco and painted with stories of Jove--namely, his
birth, his being nursed by the Goat Amaltheia, and her coronation, with
two other stories on either side of the last-named, showing her being
placed in the heavens among the forty-eight Heavenly Signs, and another
similar story of the same Goat, which alludes, as also do the others, to
the name of Caprarola. On the walls of this hall are perspective-views
of buildings drawn by Vignuola and coloured by his son-in-law, which are
very beautiful and make the room seem larger than it is. Beside this
hall is a smaller hall of forty palms, which comes exactly at the next
corner, and in it, besides the works in stucco, are painted things that
are all significant of Spring. Continuing from this little hall towards
the other angle (that is, towards the point of the pentagon, where a
tower has been begun), one goes into three chambers, each forty palms
broad and thirty long. In the first of these are various inventions
executed in stucco and painting, representing Summer, to which season
this first chamber is dedicated. In that which follows there is painted
and wrought in the same manner the season of Autumn; and in the last,
which is sheltered from the north, and decorated likewise in the same
manner, there is represented in a similar kind of work the season of
Winter.

So far we have spoken (with regard to the floor that is over the
underground rooms of the basement, cut out of the tufa, where there are
rooms for the servants, kitchens, larders, and wine-cellars) of the half
of this pentagonal edifice--namely, of the part on the right hand.
Opposite to that part, on the left hand, there are rooms exactly equal
in number and of the same size. Withi