1I loved your care and concern, in that when you heard I was going to my Tuscan estate in the summer, you advised me not to, thinking it unhealthy. 2The coast of Etruria which stretches along the shore is, to be sure, oppressive and unhealthy; 2but my estate lies far back from the sea, and indeed it sits below the Apennines, the healthiest of mountains. 3And so, that you may set aside all fear on my account, hear about the climate, the lie of the land and the charm of the house, which will be pleasant for you to hear and for me to tell. 4The climate in winter is cold and frosty; 4myrtles, olives and whatever else thrives on constant warmth it rejects and spurns; 4yet it tolerates the laurel and even produces it very glossy, and kills it sometimes, but not more often than in the neighbourhood of our city.
5The summer is wonderfully mild: the air is always stirred by some breath of wind, though it has breezes more often than winds. 6Hence the many old men: you may see grandfathers and great-grandfathers of men already grown, hear old stories and the talk of our ancestors, and when you arrive there you may think you were born in another age. 7The shape of the countryside is very beautiful. 7Picture an immense amphitheatre, such as only nature could create. 7A broad, spreading plain is ringed by mountains, and the mountains have tall, ancient woods on their highest parts. 8There is plentiful and varied hunting there. 8From there woods for cutting come down with the mountainside itself.
8Between these are rich, earthy hills — for it is not easy to come across rock anywhere, even if you look for it — which yield nothing in fertility to the flattest fields, and ripen a rich harvest, only later, but no less fully. 9Below them vineyards stretch along every slope and weave a single surface far and wide; 9at their end, at their lowest edge as it were, plantations of trees spring up. 10Then come meadows and fields, fields which only huge oxen and the strongest ploughs can break up: the very stiff soil, when first cut, rises in such great clods that it is only tamed at the ninth furrow.
11The meadows, flowery and jewelled, nourish clover and other grasses, always tender and soft and seemingly fresh. 11For everything is fed by never-failing streams; 11but where there is most water there is no marsh, because the sloping land pours whatever moisture it receives and does not absorb into the Tiber. 12The Tiber cuts through the middle of the fields, navigable for ships, and carries all the produce down to the city, though only in winter and spring; 12in summer it sinks, abandons the name of a mighty river in its dry bed, and takes it back in autumn. 13You will feel great pleasure if you look out over this landscape from the mountain.
13For you will seem to see not land but a picture of extraordinary beauty: such is the variety, such the arrangement, that wherever your eyes fall they will be refreshed. 14The house, set at the foot of a hill, has a view as if from the top: it rises so gently and gradually, the slope deceiving you, that when you do not think you are climbing, you find you have climbed. 14Behind, it has the Apennines, but some distance off; 14from them it receives breezes on even the clearest and calmest day, yet not sharp or excessive ones, but wearied and broken by the very distance. 15A large part of it faces south, and seems to invite the summer sun from midday, and the winter sun rather earlier, into a portico that is broad and long in proportion.
15There are many rooms in this part, and even an atrium in the old style. 16In front of the portico is a terrace laid out in many shapes and edged with box; 16from it slopes down a bank on which box has traced the figures of animals facing one another; 16on the level is acanthus, soft and almost, I might say, flowing. 17Round this runs a walk enclosed by low, variously clipped shrubs; 17beyond these is a drive in the shape of a circus, which surrounds box cut into many shapes and dwarf trees kept down by hand. 17Everything is protected by a wall: box, rising in tiers, covers and hides it.
18Beyond that is a meadow, as worth seeing for its nature as those earlier parts are for their art; 18then, further off, fields and many other meadows and plantations. 19From the head of the portico a dining-room projects; 19through its folding doors it sees the end of the terrace and, beyond it, the meadow and a wide stretch of countryside, while through its windows it looks out on one side upon the side of the terrace and the part of the house that juts out, on the other upon the grove and foliage of the adjoining hippodrome. 20Roughly opposite the middle of the portico a suite of rooms is set a little back; it surrounds a small court shaded by four plane trees.
20Among these, water overflows from a marble basin and refreshes the surrounding plane trees and the ground beneath them with a gentle spray. 21In this suite there is a bedroom for sleeping which shuts out daylight, noise and sound, and joined to it a dining-room for everyday use and for friends: it looks out on that small court, on the wing of the portico, and on everything the portico looks out on. 22There is also another bedroom, green and shady from the nearest plane tree, decorated with marble up to the dado, and a painting of branches and of birds perched on the branches yields nothing to the charm of the marble.
23In this room is a little fountain, and in the fountain a bowl; 23around it a number of small pipes blend a most delightful murmur. 23In the corner of the portico a very large bedroom faces the dining-room; 23from some windows it looks down on the terrace, from others on the meadow, but first on a fishpond, which lies beneath the windows and serves them, pleasant both to hear and to see; 24for the water, leaping down from a height, foams white as the marble receives it. 24This same bedroom is very warm in winter, because it is flooded with abundant sun. 25A heated room adjoins it, and if the day is cloudy, steam is let in to take the place of the sun.
25Next, a spacious and cheerful undressing room of the baths leads into the cold room, in which there is a large, shaded swimming bath. 25If you want to swim more widely or in warmer water, there is a pool in the courtyard, and close by a well, from which you can brace yourself again if you tire of the warmth. 26Joined to the cold room is the intermediate one, which the sun most kindly attends; 26the hot room more so, for it projects. 26In this there are three plunge baths, two in the sun, the third further from the sun, but no further from the light. 27Above the undressing room is a ball court, which can take several kinds of exercise and several groups of players.
27Not far from the baths is a staircase leading to a covered arcade, first passing three suites of rooms. 27Of these one overlooks that small court with the four plane trees, another the meadow, another the vineyards, and they have views of different quarters of the sky. 28At the top of the covered arcade is a bedroom cut out of the arcade itself, which looks out on the hippodrome, the vineyards and the mountains. 28Adjoining it is a bedroom open to the sun, especially the winter sun. 28From here begins a suite which links the hippodrome to the house. 28Such is the appearance, such the use, of the front. 29At the side is a summer covered arcade set on high ground, which seems not to look at the vineyards but to touch them.
29In the middle of it a dining-room receives a most healthy breeze from the valleys of the Apennines; 29at the back it lets in the vineyards through very wide windows, and through its folding doors the vineyards too, but by way of the arcade, as it were. 30Along the side of the dining-room that has no windows, a staircase by a more private route supplies what is needed for a dinner party. 30At the end is a bedroom, to which the arcade itself offers no less pleasant a view than the vineyards. 30Beneath is a covered arcade like an underground one; 30in summer it is chilly with the cold shut inside, and, content with its own air, it neither needs breezes nor admits them.
31Behind both covered arcades, where the dining-room ends, begins a portico which is wintry before midday and summery as the day declines. 31By it you reach two suites, in one of which there are four bedrooms, in the other three, and as the sun moves round they enjoy either sun or shade. 32Far, far surpassing this arrangement and charm of the buildings is the hippodrome. 32It lies open in the middle and presents itself whole to the eyes of those entering at once; it is surrounded by plane trees; 32these are clothed with ivy, and so they are green at the top with their own leaves and at the bottom with another's.
32The ivy wanders over trunk and branches and links neighbouring plane trees by passing across. 32Between them is box; 32laurel surrounds the outer box trees and adds its shade to the shade of the planes. 33Here the straight boundary of the hippodrome is broken at the far end by a semicircle and changes its appearance: it is surrounded and covered by cypresses, darker and blacker with denser shade; 33in its inner circles — for there are several — it receives the clearest daylight. 34From there it even produces roses, and relieves the coolness of the shade with not unwelcome sun. 34When that varied and manifold curve is finished, it returns to the straight boundary, and not to that alone, for several paths are divided by box hedges running between.
35Here a small lawn, there the box itself comes in between, laid out in a thousand shapes, sometimes letters, which spell now the owner's name, now the craftsman's: in places little obelisks rise, in places fruit trees are set among them, and in this most urbane work there is a sudden imitation, as it were, of countryside brought in. 35The middle space is adorned on both sides with shorter plane trees. 36Behind these, on this side and that, is acanthus, slippery and winding, then more figures and more names. 36At the head is a semicircular couch of white marble, shaded by a vine; 36four slender columns of Carystian marble support the vine.
36From the couch water flows out through small pipes, as though pressed out by the weight of those reclining, is received in a hollowed stone, held in a delicate marble basin, and so secretly regulated that it fills it without overflowing. 37The appetisers and the heavier dishes are set on the rim, while the lighter ones float round in vessels shaped like little boats and birds. 37Opposite, a fountain throws out water and takes it back; 37for the water, forced up high, falls back on itself and, through connected openings, is both swallowed and raised up. 37Facing the couch, a bedroom opposite gives back to the couch as much beauty as it receives from it.
38It gleams with marble; through its folding doors it projects and comes out into the greenery, and through its upper and lower windows looks up and down on other greenery. 38Next a little alcove withdraws, as if into the same bedroom and yet another one. 38There is a couch here and windows on every side, and yet the light is dim, with the shade pressing in. 39For a most luxuriant vine climbs over the whole building and mounts to the roof-ridge. 39You may lie there just as in a grove, only you would not feel the rain as you would in a grove. 40Here too a fountain springs up and at once disappears.
40In many places there are marble seats, which help those tired by walking just as the bedroom itself does. 40Little fountains lie beside the seats; 40throughout the whole hippodrome channelled streams murmur and follow wherever the hand has led them: by them now these plants, now those, and sometimes all at once, are watered. 41I would long ago have avoided seeming too fussy, had I not set out to go round every corner with you in my letter. 41For I was not afraid that it would be wearisome for you to read what would not have been wearisome to visit, especially since you could pause, if you liked, and, putting the letter down, sit down to rest, as it were, more often.
41Besides, I have indulged my love; 41for I love what I have largely begun myself or, once begun, have finished. 42In short — for why should I not reveal to you either my judgement or my error? 42— I consider the first duty of a writer to be that he should read his title and ask himself again and again what he has set out to write, and know that if he dwells on his subject he is not long, but very long if he fetches in and drags in something extra. 43You see in how many lines Homer, in how many Vergil describes the arms, the latter of Aeneas, the former of Achilles; 43yet each is brief, because he does what he set out to do.
43You see how Aratus tracks down and gathers even the tiniest stars; 43yet he keeps within measure. 43For this is not a digression of his, but the work itself. 44Likewise with me, to compare 'small with great', when I try to set the whole house before your eyes, if I say nothing irrelevant and as it were off the road, it is not the letter which describes but the house which is described that is large. 44But back to where I began, so that I may not rightly be censured under my own law if I am too long in this digression I have made. 45There you have my reasons for preferring my Tuscan estate to my places at Tusculum, Tibur and Praeneste.
45For besides what I have mentioned, the leisure there is deeper and richer and therefore more carefree: no need for a toga, no one calling me from next door, everything calm and quiet, which itself adds to the healthiness of the region, as does the purer sky and the clearer air. 46There I am at my healthiest in mind and in body. 46For I exercise my mind with study and my body with hunting. 46My household, too, lives nowhere more healthily; 46up till now, at any rate, I have not lost there — pardon my saying so — a single one of those I brought with me. 46Only may the gods preserve this joy for me, and this glory for the place, in the future!
46Farewell.