THE GARDENS OF VENICE 



Padua and Cittadella, far from the noise and smoke 

 of Rome. Farther still from Venice, in the distant hills 

 of Friuli, Bembo's kinsman, Giorgio Grademigo, spent 

 the happiest days of his life in a villa at Cividale. 



" Oh, how I enjoy my summer here ! " he writes. " I 

 spend the whole evening, until two hours after sunset, 

 walking about the fields, and the dawn of day never 

 finds me in my bed. For at Cividale the sky is bluer, 

 and the sun and stars seem to me to shine more brightly 

 than in any other place on earth. Sickness is unknown 

 there, and melancholy flies away." * 



A curious treatise on Venetian villas was written by 

 the Florentine Antonio Doni, originally a Servite friar, 

 who gave up his vows and sought refuge in Venice, 

 where he became intimate with several of the above- 

 named scholars, and spent his last years in a villa at 

 Monselice. The writer divides Venetian country- 

 houses into four classes first, the superb palaces laid 

 out on a vast scale by wealthy patricians, with frescoed 

 halls and colonnades, chapel and cloisters ; secondly, 

 the more modest villas, where tired officials and over- 

 worked scholars sought repose and leisure in the brief 

 intervals which they could snatch from their public 

 duties; thirdly, the houses and estates bought by 

 merchants as a profitable investment ; and fourthly, the 

 podere cultivated by farmers and peasants, who made 

 a living out of the soil. The villas of Bembo and 



1 L. Dolce, Lettere, ii. 467. 

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