TEE GARDENS SOF  IRARY, 
The former owners must have been kin to 
that Claudio Accoramboni whose beautiful and 
infamous daughter Vittoria married the nephew 
of Cardinal Montalto, who built the second Villa 
at Lante and afterwards became Sixtus V. She 
schemed her first husband’s: murder, in order that 
she might marry the Duke of Bracciano, and was 
brutally murdered herself by Prince Lodovico 
Orsini, the Duke’s next-of-kin. 
In the tiny chapel within doors is a gay and 
charming altar-piece by Soliani, a late Tuscan 
master. Many members of the Capponi family 
were buried beneath the chapel pavement, but 
when the villa was sold the Capponi asked to be 
allowed to remove the bones to the seat of the 
head of the family, and it was a request which the 
present owners were not unwilling to grant. 
One of the most notable objects from Villa 
Capponi, is Galileo’s ‘Tower, which stands just 
below. Here the great astronomer lived and wrote 
and lost his sight and died. It was either here 
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or in a villa a little below, the Villa del Gioello, 
that Milton visited Galileo, and Milton must 
certainly have been thinking of it when he 
wrote: 
“May my lamp at midnight hour 
Be seen from some high, lonely tower, 
Where I may long outwatch the Bear 
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere 
The Spirit of Plato, or unfold 
What worlds or what vast regions hold 
The immortal soul that hath forsook 
Her mansion in this fleshly nook.” 
For sixteen years Galileo lived in the little 
Villa dell Ombrellino on Bellosguardo. It was here 
that he composed the famous dialogues on the 
Copernican system, and received the visits of every 
learned man of the day who came up the hill 
to listen to his fun and wit and wisdom, and on 
these slopes how often on summer and winter 
nights : 
“Many a cypress threw 
Its length of shadow while he watched the stars.” 
