THE GARDENS OF ITALY. 
carriage drive and built some supplementary walls 
during his so-called « imprisonment.” 
The gardens are entered from the Museum of 
Sculpture at the back of St. Peter’s, and for more 
than a cursory glimpse of them a special permit 
ig required. This is obtained from one of the 
Cardinals, and requires to be wiséd by the major- 
domo, who is to be found near the entrance to 
the Scala Regia. Armed with this, a delicious early 
morning wander can be enjoyed. The gardens are 
cleared at twelve, when the Pope generally walks or 
drives there. 
They are of horseshoe shape. On entering, a 
noble terrace stretches away and goes round two 
sides of a large formal garden. This terrace, which 
has a beautiful view of the great dome, is the place 
where Leo XIII. so often sat, and where the well- 
known picture of him, surrounded by his Cardinals, 
was painted. It is sheltered by a high close-clipped 
wall of greenery, in which statues are set at intervals ; 
beyond, are dropping terraces with walks dark and 
shady under bowering ilexes, and openings cut here 
and there, in which fountains fling high their silver 
showers. 
At the end of the first stretch of terrace 
the carriage road mounts up the hill and encircles 
the grounds ; but more tempting than the wide, 
well-kept drive, is an irregular opening in the green 
wall, through which you pass into a bosky wood, 
wild and shady, exquisite in the spring-time when 
the elms and birches are fresh with tender green, 
the ground starred with blue and white anemones 
and rosy cyclamen and bluebells, and the blackbirds 
and nightingales sing in every bush. The little 
woodland glade is dotted about with relics of 
antiquity, remains of the masses of marble and stone 
works which must have once adorned this spot. 
Here is a little votive altar half hidden in feathery 
green, there a graceful figure of a nymph stands 
in the flickering sunlight, or a tall, worn stone cross, 
a relic of early Christian days, towers above an old 
sarcophagus. If it were not for these documents 
in stone, we might fancy ourselves in some lovely 
English wood ; but they carry us back to a remote 
past whose sequence with to-day has never been 
broken. 
At the top of the wood the ground opens out, 
and upon the crest of the hill is a small villa with 
plainly-furnished rooms, and a little chapel, built as 
a summer residence for Leo XIII. Beyond it is a 
vineyard with a broad walk leading to the ugly 
modern grotto of the Madonna of Lourdes, and 
further on, to a large enclosure for wild animals 3a 
sort of menagerie. Here are ostriches, pelicans, 
and other foreign birds, and various kinds of deer. 
The present Pope often walks here, and comes 
to watch them through the bars. The long wall 
here, with the Saracenic tower, was that held by 
the Roman volunteers who fought so well against 
the French in 1849. The sculptor, W. W. Story, 
speaks of his visit during the defénce. “As we 
looked from the wall on this the third day after 
(45 
the battle, we saw the monks under the black flag 
looking for the unburied dead who had fallen in 
the ditches or among the hedges. The French had 
retreated without an effort to bury their dead, and 
a living, wounded man was found on this third 
day with the bodies of two dead soldiers lying across 
him.” A little below this we come to a tiny 
summer-house, in which is a gilt chair where His 
Holiness may rest after the climb uphill. A shady 
pergola of vines stretches in front of it, under which 
the light is golden green on the hottest summer 
day, and this is a favourite promenade of the present, 
as it was of the late, Pope. Not far off is Pope 
Leo’s little writing house, in which he used often 
to transact business with his secretary. During the 
great heat Leo XIII. often went up to the garden 
at nine in the morning, after saying mass, and spent 
the whole day in the garden, receiving everyone 
there, dining in the garden pavilion, guarded by 
the Swiss, to whom he generally sent a measure 
of good wine, and in the cool of the day he would 
take a drive, and not return to the Vatican till 
after sunset. The road passes near his little summer- 
house, and it was at this point that on his last drive 
the aged pontiff stopped the carriage, and raising 
himself, looked long over the Eternal City lying 
below him, with the Alban Hills rising far beyond. 
Pius IX. used to ride here on his white mule, and 
the present Pope walks here nearly every day. 
Past a rough grotto fountain on the slope of 
the hill, the road leads downward to the lower and 
more formal part of the garden, past a fine wall 
fountain, where the water spouts in jets and stars 
over the brown lip of a basin fringed with maiden- 
hair fern. As we look at the water gushing from 
the rocks we may recall that it was brought here 
in its plenty by Trajan, after a terrible inundation 
led him to restrain and turn the Tiber. This, 
according to Falda’s old book of gardens of 1640, 
went by the name of Fontana delli Torri, and from 
it the path winds to the entrance to a little palm 
garden, which of old was the garden of the simples. 
Immediately below is the entrance to the nucleus, 
the most beautiful spot in the garden, the Casino 
of Pius IV., the Villa Pia, the chef d’auvre of the 
famous architect Pirro Ligorio, built with material 
taken from the stadium of Domitian in Piazza 
Navona. 
A stone-paved courtyard is set round with low 
walls and seats, above which are ranged stone vases, 
in which grow stiff yet graceful aloes; at either 
end is a beautiful porch-like recess, the arch of 
which is filled by a great, graceful shell decoration, 
and the sides have busts set in niches, the whole 
decorated in the rich and fanciful style of the 
Renaissance with delicate painting and stucco-work. 
On one side is a large garden-house, airy, yet with 
a certain stateliness, its facade rich and dainty with 
wreaths and bas-reliefs. The walls within are 
painted with gay medallions by Zuccaro, Baroccio, 
and Santi di Tito. Here are two ancient mosaics, 
one representing a hunt, the other a bacchanalian 
) 
