Palladio four books of architecture monticello

His belief in the triumph of reason, in carving a well-ordered personal universe in the midst of the ancient Virginia wilderness, is obvious to see. Jefferson was not just an 18th-century slaveholding aristocrat-politician, as his critics like to remind us, but an 18th-century intellect, supremely confident and versatile, curious about nature and the world of ideas.

As you climb the low, sloping incline to Monticello - whose name means 'little mountain' in Italian - you leave the realm of interstates and visitors' centers and pass into the world of the American Enlightenment. The house is approached on the roads leading southeast from Charlottesville, the home of another famous Jefferson invention, the University of Virginia. Finally, in 1923, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, a private organization based in New York, purchased the house and surrounding acreage and began the long, laborious process of restoration, acquisition, planting and renovation. For nearly a century the house remained in private hands. When Jefferson died in 1826, he was deeply in debt his family auctioned off his furnishings, and in 1831 Monticello was sold for $7,000 to a druggist who wished to establish a silk worm culture. Surprisingly, such homage was impossible until comparatively recently. And in this 250th anniversary year of Jefferson's birth, visitors are coming in ever- rising numbers to pay homage to the author of the Declaration of Independence. No one but Thomas Jefferson, the nation's third president, could have imagined Monticello, and his spirit still pervades and inhabits the place.ДЄs President Clinton demonstrated this past January, when he came to Monticello to retrace Jefferson's inaugural route to Washington, the Virginia gentleman's country estate is now a place of pilgrimage for Americans. No statesman's estate or writer's study, no local attraction or national shrine is so obviously the product of its owner's copious mind.

Forget nature, for the moment, which it nearly overshadows: There is no other house quite like this in America. More than two centuries after Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, the traveler traverses the low Virginia hills, crosses rivers and creeks, even braves the heavy Piedmont rains and dampened summer heat to gaze at Monticello. Today, of course, the process is reversed.

Palladio four books of architecture monticello