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the Romans. In his
Natural History
, Pliny the Elder wrote
of “the Emperor Caligula, who on an estate at Velletri,
was impressed by the flooring of a single plane tree, and
benches laid loosely on beams consisting of its branches
and held a banquet in the tree”.
More than 1,500 years after Caligula’s death in
41AD, tree houses were still an amusement for anyone
frommonks who built small hermitages in trees near
monasteries for prayer andmeditation, to the most
powerful personages of the Renaissance. At the Villa di
Castello in Tuscany, Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–74), the first
Grand Duke of Tuscany, had a garden designed by Niccolò
Tribolo in 1538 that included a dwelling concealed in an
ivy-covered oak tree with a square dining room inside.
“These special dwellings fire our imagination, bringing back childhood
memories and the desire to climb up and enter amagicworld”
ACROSSTHENETWORK
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