The palace was perfected during the Renaissance and remains one of architecture's most enduring images, a dignified, large-scale city element that has been adapted and repeated ever since. Palaces were first built in Florence, Italy, and then throughout the Western world. In France the concept of the palace was combined with that of the late medieval castle to produce the French country château—the setting, with its gardens and fountains, of aristocratic life from the 16th century onwards. In England the lord's manor became the squire's hall, the centre of an estate