Villa Oliva

This guide to Villa Oliva outside Lucca opens with a feat of stone: around 1500 the Buonvisi, a family of Lucchese silk merchants and bankers, raised a loggia whose towering columns were each cut as a single uncracked block hauled from a hillside quarry. The design came from Matteo Civitali, a sculptor turned architect who died in 1501, leaving masons to finish a facade meant to outdo anyone else in the valley. You'll hear how the family's fortune, made in looms and banking counters as far as Flanders and England, later passed to the Orsetti family, who reshaped the grounds. Look up at the loggia's five arches and count the columns.