222 



THE GARDENS OF ITALY. 



reaping, feasting, and leading teams of white oxen, surround the symbolical nymph. A very 

 happily utilised fable is that of Phaeton, child of Apollo, who, having obtained his father's 

 leave to drive one of his chariots, turned his four horses out of their usual course, with the 

 result that the world was so burnt up by the excessive heat that Jove, indignant, flung the 

 chariot and driver into the Po in the form of lightning, whence originates the ' summer 

 lightning " that plays among the clouds on hot nights. 



' Autumn ' has vines and fruits, intoxicated bacchantes borne by satyrs, the birth of 

 Bacchus, the wine god returning from a trip to the Indies, having Indian houris among his 

 attendants. One of those quaint and little known myths is here illustrated ; Bacchus, 

 trampled underfoot by tyrant Titans, crushed to death, his limbs boiled over a fire, suddenly 

 reappears, more comely than before. So was typified the vine, crushed, squeezed and 

 fermented for wine, but still the scattered branches once more throwing out leaves and bearing 

 grapes. In the " Winter " room, a solitary male figure represents the season. Circles of 



235. NORTH FRONT OF CASINO AT CAPRAROLA. 



children shivering with cold and warming themselves at fires, frozen rivers and leafless 

 branches, such are the incidents that form the setting. The gods hold a council over the 

 proposed destruction of the world, Vulcan binds Boreas, and Eolus, god of the winds, holds 

 aloft a flag, while the clouds part after a terrible storm. 



A room at the back of the palace opens out on to a bridge which crosses the moat and leads 

 into the garden (Fig. 231). Round four angles of the five-sided palace stretches a broad raised 

 walk from the walls of which you look sheer down into the moat far below. Huge statues in 

 pairs representing the seasons stand sentinel on these walls, with cypresses towering up between 

 them. Ten of these cypresses were planted at the time the palace was built ; only four or five 

 of them now remain, but these have grown to an enormous size, and in some places have forced 

 their way quite through the wall and overhang the space below. The first plateau at the 

 back is a formal garden of considerable extent, with clipped box hedges, grottoes, fountains and 

 a fine open belvedere from which to gaze out over the far-stretching plain below. When 



