There is no  full-blown example of the Italian villa in Mahone Bay,  but we do have this "showpiece" at 624 Main Street, created for a sea captain, John Bleysteiner in 1848. It is a thoroughly renovated home.

It has Italianate arched windows, an essential Roman motif, often called  "Palladian Windows" after Andre Palladio who popularized them.  The ornate brackets  under the eaves are also characteristic!  The original buildings had roofs  which were  low-pitched to fit a Mediterranean environment.

The Italianate developed during the Italian Renaissance in northern Italy. The first examples were modest town or country houses termed "villas." This architecture led to the creation of small, elegant, Italian palaces and this design was transferred to Queen Victoria's Osborne House.  North American Italianate copied this model,. The original Italian houses were built of stone covered with stucco with the body of the house painted red or yellow, contrasting colours being used for trim. The modern paint job see in the middle panel is not terribly out of character.

The two gable-ended dormers are not bad but those first storey bays simply would not occur on the front elevation of an Italianate. Roof pitch remained low in the first North American examples, but it gradually steepened merging first into the Mansard style and then the French Second Empire. At this point in time,  a good many liberties were taken with the Italianate,  as it morphed into Eclectic Victorian Style.

Liberties have  also been taken with many additions visited on this house during the last century. The symmetry has definitely been thrown off by that porch addition at left. In the prototypes that central tower would extend a bit above the ridge line so adding a backyard shed dormer has killed that architectural rule.

Generally speaking it was characteristic of these house to show a lot of detail "robust cornices incorporating heavily developed brackets. That was missing from the beginning with this example.  What brackets exist are over the bay windows and these are arranged in pairs in the typical manner.

Windows and doors received a heavy three-dimensional treatment with moulding that were much thicker than the average and a good deal more expensive! Allen Penney says that homes such as this were built with the expressed intention of  giving "an impression of aggressive new wealth."

Amazingly, the Bleysteiner house was a simple Neoclassic creation with not dormers, towers or madcap windows and doors. John McLean. the shipbuilder married Bleysteiner's daughter in 1861 and moved in three months after the old man's death. He created this delightful confection. He passed the home to his son William,  who operated the family businesses located immediately east of Main Street until 1961.