A Comparison between American and Italian Homes

Part 1 of a 1927 magazine article on The Perfect Home

THERE are twenty-room villas on the lovely hillsides of Florence, Italy, that can be had for fewer dollars than the purchase price of half a twin house in the reclaimed swamp region of South Philadelphia. These villas have no gas, no electricity, no adequate sewerage system, no furnace, no hot and cold running water, nary a bathtub. But they are beautiful to look at from the outside. Several acres of gardens that suggest Paradise surround them. There are magnificent olive trees more than a century old. There are majestic poplars that have been pruned and trained for five generations. There are oleanders with gorgeous bloom. The selection and placing of the shrubbery is a work of justly famed Florentine art. Landscape architects from every clime go to these gardens to make sketches and purloin ideas. Too frequently they seek to adapt them in the wrong setting.

A young couple of very limited means dwell in one of these villas and are so intoxicated with the beauty and charm of the surroundings that their senses are numb to the innumerable inconveniences and shortcomings of the house itself. The young husband is a Latin scholar and the young wife writes sonnets. They call it a perfect home.

In half a twin house in the reclaimed swamp area of South Philadelphia another young couple are in the beginning stages of home making. It is a cramped and cabined little house, but it is lighted with electricity and provided with gas, hot and cold running water, a tiny tiled bathroom, almost-hardwood floors, a telephone, a radio, an electric sewing machine, a vacuum cleaner, an electric washing machine and a diminutive but nevertheless efficient electric ice box. There is also a tiny garage that contains a tiny motor-driven coupe lovingly known as Little Henry.

The young husband in this very modern little dwelling sells electric ice boxes and the young wife is still employed as secretary in a lawyer’s office. Their combined small salaries have bought and equipped this little home, which at present is to them preeminently perfect. Perfect notwithstanding that there are only twenty-six square feet of scraggly sod by way of garden, a seedy-looking sycamore tree out near the curb and a microscopic paved area out in back where a wash may be hung out. There is no outlook from this little house save a huge gas tank a short distance away across the flats that are being gouged by tractors to build more and more rows of twin houses all of the same unlovely bandbox patterns.

The Perfect home – To be continued…