Jefferson, at the time he began Monticello, had never been anywhere larger than Williamsburg, the colonial capital, where he had attended the College of William and Mary, and Williamsburg, with some two thousand people, was hardly a metropolis. Although he later traveled to Italy, he never saw the Villa Capra and would almost certainly have been astounded by it because the Villa Capra is enormous compared with Monticello. Though they look very similar in illustrations, Palladio’s version is built on a scale that makes Monticello seem almost cottagelike. Partly this is because Monticello’s
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