ITALIAN GARDENS OF THE RENAISSANCE 



poets and scholars who fed at the Pope's table were 

 dismissed. Silence reigned in the vast halls where 

 his Holiness lived alone with two dull Flemish 

 chamberlains and employed an old peasant woman 

 to cook his meals. 



When the ambassadors asked leave to see the 

 Belvedere, they were kept waiting over an hour while 

 the Pope sent for the keys of his private door, by 

 which alone access to the villa could be gained, since 

 he had ordered the other eleven entrances to be closed. 

 The priceless antiques which adorned the Cortile were 

 in Adrian's eyes but Pagan idols, which, as the 

 Venetian Negri remarked, he would gladly have 

 broken up and ground into lime for use in the 

 building of St. Peter's. But when once admittance 

 had been obtained, the ambassadors were lost in 

 wonder and delight. They walked through Bramante's 

 colonnades and Raphael's brilliantly decorated loggia, 

 still in part unfinished, to the villa and looked down 

 on the churches and palaces of the Eternal City with 

 the many-coloured plains of the Campagna and Alban 

 Hills beyond " a place indeed," they exclaimed, 

 "worthy of the name Belvedere" Here they found 

 themselves in the fairest garden in the world, laid out 

 with grassy lawns and groves of laurel, cypress, and 

 mulberry trees, and adorned with fountains of sparkling 

 waters. Then they passed through a lofty portico, 



