THE GARDENS or ITALY. 



53 



CHAPTER V. 



VILLA MEDICI, ROME. 



THERE is no building more familiar than this great cream-coloured villa, with its two 

 small square lowers, which, rising on the Pincian hill against a rich green background 

 of ilex anil stone pine, looks out over the city of Rome, across a close-cut grove, 

 wherein a fountain splashes into a wide basin of brown masonry. Here St. Peter's 

 is framed in the sunset view, as a purple dome against a flaming sky. 



Twice a week the e turns on its hinges to admit visitors ; the surly old guard, a 



former soldier of France, passes you in. You are on French territory, and you pass up the shadowy 

 ven on a summer's day, as the guest of the French Academy. As an approach to the 

 villa a broad walk leads along a terrace, bounded by a low wall veiled in spring and summer 

 by a mass of pink monthly roses. Part is now shut in by overgrown trees, but part is kept, 

 as, no doubt, it all was originally, as a sort of quarter-deck from which to enjoy the prospect to 

 the full. The view from the Villa Medici is not more magnificent to the eye than it is suggestive 

 to the mind. It is the centre of a panorama of Rome, and from it almost every point of interest 

 may be discerned monuments, palaces and churches, the Colosseum in the distance, > ven the 

 far-off aqueducts and the horizon line of mountains. The position, the most beautiful in Rome, 



66. THE VILLA MEDICI. 



