9 



THE GARDENS OF ITALY. 



of it or belonged to a portico of a later period. From this spot started the long procession, 

 memorable even in the annals of Roman triumphs .accompany ing the proud and beautiful Queen, 

 who was decked with jewels and chained with golden chains to her chariot. From the mediaeval 

 palace of the Colonnas * Isabella d'Este looked down upon the sack of Rome, and on these 

 terraces, in the late years of the Renaissance, the good, the beautiful, and the learned Vittoria 

 Colonna walked and conversed with Cardinal Bembo, with Ariosto and Bernardo Tasso, and, 

 above all, with Michael Angelo. Here for five years, in the height of her beauty and 

 happiness, and in the heyday of her husband's triumph, she held her court and gathered 

 round her all that Italy had of choice to offer, and here, too, she came back, a widowed, 

 childless, heartbroken woman, to die, with the great Florentine painter sitting by her bed, 

 holding her hand, helping her to recollect her last prayer, her faithful servant to the last, in 

 what Condivi calls " that most pure and beautiful friendship." Torquato Tasso ran about these 



100. THE ASCENT TO THE COLONNA GARDEN. 



gardens as a little boy, for his father writes that he does not wish the children to go into the 

 country in the summer as they get too hot, but that the duke has lent him the Boccaccio vineyard, 

 as it was then called, " and we have been here a week and shall stay all the summer in 

 this good air." 



There is another woman who is recalled by the wide gates, the courtyard, the gardens as 

 they are to-day. She who was mistress of the splendours of the palace in the eighteenth 

 century Maria Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin, and wife of Lorenzo Colonna, Grand 

 Constable of Naples. A woman whose life was full of romance stranger than fiction. 



When Mazarin went to Paris and became the Minister of the young Louis XIV and the 

 adviser and passionate lover of the King's mother, Anne of Austria, he sent for his nieces, Maria, 

 Olympe and Hortense, and proposed to arrange good marriages for them. Maria has left an 

 account of her life, La verite dans son jour, which gives interesting and entertaining details of 

 her history. 



* Built by Martin V (Colonna) after 1417 ; enlarged and altered seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Piazza Santa 

 Apostoli off Via Nationale, where it makes a sharp Z turn. It contains a picture gallery, which can be visited. The Via 

 Pilotta runs between palace and gardens, which are reached by bridges across the street. A.T.B. 



