64. THE GARDENS OF ITALY. 



beauty that it is difficult to match them, even in Rome. On the outside of the villa, fronting 

 the city, are granite columns, and the great door has a casing of beaten iron, fastened with a 

 thousand round-headed nails. In this sturdy envelope may be descried three deep holes, 

 which it is said were made by bullets fired from the Castle of St. Angelo. Not in time of war, 

 bill as a joke, by order of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had promised to awake the master of 

 the villa by " knocking at his door " to bid him make one of a hunting party. 



In the villa, above all, once stood the famous Venus de Medici. She was exiled to Florence 

 in 1665. It was the one memorable act in a reign of one month of Innocent XI, who was 

 persuaded that the statue was inimical to morality, and ought to be removed from the eyes of 

 Rome. To imagine in some degree what the villa was like in its great days let us remember 

 that v/hat we now see are only the remains of one hundred and twenty-eight statues, fifty-four 

 busts, eight urns or sarcophagi, twenty-eight bas-reliefs and thirty-one columns of marble. 



The little chapel of St. Gaetano, which to-day is occupied as a studio, in the north-west 

 corner received its name from the founder of the Order of Oratorians, who, in the fifteenth 

 century, took refuge here with his disciples during the sack of Rome. Discovered by the Spanish 

 soldiers, who were hunting for treasure, the saint was terribly tortured at their hands. They 

 then seized the Father Paoletto, and hung him by the hair from a tree in the garden. Escaping, 

 he attributed his preservation to a vow which he made to St. Francis de Paul. 



In 1633-34 tne palace served as an asylum to the immortal Galileo, at the time when he had 

 to give an account of his system before the Inquisition. On discovering the satellites of 

 Jupiter he had luckily given to them the name of " Stars of the Medici," and so doing earned 

 the gratitude and powerful protection of that House. Marie de Medici, afterwards Queen of 

 Henry IV, passed here a part of her youth. Her room was on the second storey, with 

 windows looking south over the city. In 1770 the Emperor Joseph II and his brother, the 

 Grand Duke Leopold of the House of Lorraine, sojourned here for a time, but it was then no 

 longer owned by the Medici, and Lorraine and Austria were masters of Tuscany while the 

 great House of Medici flickered out in 1737. 



Long before this the splendours of the villa had diminished. All had depended on one 

 family, and followed its fortunes. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the splendour 

 of the Medici was concentrated at Florence, and as one Grand Duke succeeded another he thought 

 less and less of the villa, or only remembered to despoil it. Niobe and her children were taken 

 to Florence ; the two lions went to the Loggia dei Lanzi ; the Mercury, the Cleopatra, the vase, 

 all the most precious treasures vanished. In 1798 the Neapolitans pillaged its halls, and the 

 little that was left became still less. In 1801 the property passed by negotiation to the Grand 

 Duke of Parma, and two years later it became the property of the French Academy, the 

 Directors of which have done much to restore its beauty. 



At every step you come across some beauty of nature or of art. The whole garden 

 is set in marvellous hedges of clipped box, above which towers the dark velvet of stone pines. 

 Sarcophagi serve as basins for the fountains, and crumbling statues gleam from niches cut in 

 the thick greenery. Huge ancient receptacles for oil or wine stand on pedestals, and vases 

 and tubs of lemon trees are placed on the richly carved capitals of broken columns. In front 

 of the garden entrance is a broad gravelled court, in the midst of which is a fountain over- 

 grown with arum lilies ; beyond it lies a formal garden, where oleanders bloom and magnolias 

 make the air heavy with perfume. A charming statue of a dreaming Eros is to be seen reposing 

 upon an old tomb. At the entrance to a long alley, between two columns united by 

 an architrave beneath which once stood a famous statue of Cleopatra, is now placed an 

 antique statue of Apollo. It has been restored by the addition of a most beautiful head, said 

 to be of Meleager, and attributed to the hand of Scopas himself. Standing in such a graceful 

 setting of columns, with roses rioting all round and dark ilexes as a background, this statue 

 is one of the most striking features of the garden. Velazquez has left two interesting sketches, 

 which are now in Madrid, of the long gallery in the garden, and of a fountain with ilexes. 



Within the villa it is possible to descend a stair to the depth of eighty feet, to where, beneath 

 a vault, flow the crystal waters of the Acqua Virga, which rises eight miles from Rome, 

 and feeds many of the fountains of the city. 



