Behind the Throne by William Le Queux

Dinner at the Villa San Donato was always a stately meal, served in that huge, lofty _sala di pranzo_, or dining-room, with its marble floor, its high prison-like windows closely barred with iron, its antique frescoed walls, and old low settees covered with dark green damask running right round the apartment.

In that enormous echoing room nothing had been touched for two hundred years. The old oak furniture had been well-preserved, the great high-backed chairs, covered with leather and studded with big brass nails, the fine carved buffet, and the graven shield over the door bearing the arms of the princely house that had once owned the place, all spoke of a brilliant magnificence of days bygone when those huge halls had echoed to the tread of armed men, and the lord of San Donato entertained his retainers and bravoes with princely generosity. The villa was so huge that the guest easily lost himself in its ramifications, its long corridors and huge salons each leading from one to the other. Like all the fortified villas of the cinquecento, every window on the ground floor was closely barred, and this, combined with the bareness of the rooms, gave to them an aspect of austerity.