How the other half lived

I spend a lot of time looking for a second home in Europe — a place to spend lazy weekends and my golden years. I have narrowed it down to two properties. Neither is for sale but that could change if the market stays soft.

Anyone can tour them — because Villa Farnese at Caprarola, about 35 miles northwest of Rome, and Vaux le Vicomte, 35 miles southeast of Paris, are open to the public.

Relaxing walk

It's an easy drive from the Eternal City to Villa Farnese, which sits on a volcanic rock overlooking the little town of Caprarola.

When I take friends there, I like to start at a gelateria in the piazza below because it's a five-minute climb up sloping stone terraces to the distinguished double staircase at the entrance.

Villa Farnese is a state-owned museum but far enough off the beaten path to attract relatively few sightseers.

Visitors are admitted in groups led by docents, who usher them around without describing the villa's features — there's little in the way of printed information in English.

Some tours don't include the garden on the hill behind the villa, with its exquisite fountains and summerhouse. The lack of explanation in English frustrates some people.

It's important to know a little background. Villa Farnese, for instance, was built in the second half of the 16th century — the denouement of the Italian High Renaissance — by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a grandson of Pope Paul III, who granted the young man lucrative bishoprics all over France and Italy.

At the time, it was common for Popes to share the wealth of the throne of St Peter's with family members, especially their nephews, or nipoti — a practice that gave us the word “nepotism''.

Modern angle

A famous portrait by Titian of Pope Paul III and grandsons Alessandro and Ottavio hangs in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.

A cultivated man, Alessandro hired the best of artists of the age to modernise the villa, including architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, a former assistant to Michelangelo.

Vignola's plan retained the building's pentagonal shape but gave it a circular courtyard inside, surrounded by a columned loggia and five spiral staircases leading to stuccoed and frescoed galleries on the second floor.

Fascinating frescoes

My favourites upstairs are the Mappamondo Gallery, showing the four continents known in the 16th century (Europe, Asia, Africa and a somewhat misshapen America), and the Hall of the Feats of the Farnese, with murals like a glorified family album.

The frescoes, illustrating important historical events in which Farneses figured, were painted in fascinating detail and with luminous colours.

A bridge over the moat at the back of the villa yields to the walled lower garden, landscaped in the Italian style with clipped boxwood instead of flowers.

If you're lucky enough to go on a tour that includes the upper garden, the docent will open a gate that leads up a steep path to a series of terraces in the woods.

Each level has its own system of fountains, including one embedded in a balustrade decorated with sculpted dolphins.

The charming casino, a Villa Farnese in miniature, is perched at the apex. It is one of the official residences of the president of the Italian Republic.

With a little more furniture, I could easily move into the Villa Farnese. But I can't decide between this and Vaux le Vicomte, which is like having to choose between the Italian Renaissance and the French style of Louis XIV.

Better than the best

Like Caprarola, Vaux is appreciated chiefly by the cognoscenti who have seen Versailles, southwest of Paris, and nearby Fontainebleau.

It is smaller than the two great royal palaces but in many ways better — reached by a long, graceful “allee'' of plane trees that is, in itself, a registered historic monument.

The chateau, built by French finance minister Nicholas Fouquet, so astonished Louis XIV when he saw it in 1661 that the king hired the Vaux team — artist Charles le Brun, architect Louis le Vau and landscape designer Andre le Notre — to redesign his palace at Versailles.

The chateau Le Vau designed for Fouquet sits in perfect symmetry on a terraced platform fronted by a moat. All of that was de rigueur at the time but the architect added a high Italian-style rotunda housing an oval salon instead of a traditional square gallery.

The grand salon looks over Le Notre's garden, sweeping south across basins with fountains, gravel walkways and long parterres of boxwood clipped into arabesques, making it look like a Turkish carpet.

Wonderful surprise

In laying out the garden, Le Notre manipulated perspective so that a sunken canal at the far end of the greensward will not be seen from the chateau.

But for visitors who walk the full length of the garden, it comes as a surprise.

While the garden took shape, Le Brun painted the muses on the ceiling of Fouquet's private quarters in a frothy French 17th-century version of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel.

He also worked up elaborate plans for the grand salon's decor. But as fate would have it, they were never fully executed.

Behind every great house in Europe there is a story of a man.

At Vaux it was Fouquet, a discerning patron of the arts and friend to writers including Moliere, a brilliant politician to whom almost everyone in Paris owed favours, vastly wealthy by the time the king named him superintendent of finance.

But in the course of his meteoric career, he also made many a dangerous enemy, such as Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who whispered stories of Fouquet's fiscal chicanery in young Louis XIV's ear.

Moliere could not have envisioned a more dramatic fall from grace than that of Fouquet, who entertained the king at Vaux in the summer of 1661, unaware that Louis suspected him of embezzling from the state.

Less than a month later, Fouquet was arrested by Captain Charles de Batz Castelmore, the model for Alexandre Dumas's Comte d'Artagnan in The Three Musketeers.

The verdict of the long trial staged by Colbert was a foregone conclusion. Fouquet spent the rest of his life in prison, rumoured to have been the subject of another Dumas novel, The Man in the Iron Mask.

Meanwhile, Louis cleaned out Vaux, giving Fouquet's prized possessions a new home at Versailles.

Bringing the past alive

The paintings by Poussin and the Gobelin tapestries that visitors see at Vaux are copies, part of restorations commissioned by Alfred Sommier, who bought Vaux in 1875.

His great-grandson Patrice de Vogue continues the effort to bring the estate back to life, refurbishing the garden, opening the tower to visitors, staging Easter-egg hunts, Moliere-style entertainments and chocolate soirees.

Racks of 17th-century costumes hang near the entrance, which is why you still see little Fouquets on the grounds.

On a recent trip to Vaux, I stood on the terrace overlooking the garden, trying to decide whether to buy the chateau or the villa.

Both will need new bathrooms but it doesn't matter. Money is no object.

Go there . . . From the UAE

Vaux Le Vicomte, France
Paris is the closest airport.

From Dubai
Air France flies daily. Fare from Dh4,065
Turkish Airlines flies daily via Istanbul. Fare from Dh2,605
Swiss Air flies daily via Zurich. Fare from Dh2,775

From Abu Dhabi
Etihad flies daily. Fare from Dh3,355
Caprarola, Italy
Rome is the closest airport.

From Dubai
Emirates flies daily. Fare from Dh4,455
Swiss Air flies daily via Zurich. Fare from Dh2,705
Turkish Airlines flies daily via Istanbul. Fare from Dh1,965

— Information courtesy: The Holiday Lounge by Dnata. Ph: 04 4380454