 The principal reception rooms are on the ground floor with large sash windows opening immediately into the porticos and the colonnades , and therefore onto the gardens , a situation unheard of in the grand villas and palaces of Renaissance Italy . The mansion contains a series of 18th century salons decorated and furnished in the style of that period , with polychrome marble floors , and painted ceilings depicting classical scenes of Greek and Roman mythology . Of particular note is the entrance hall , which resembles a Roman atrium with marbled columns and a painted ceiling copied from Robert Wood 's Ruins of Palmyra . 
