GARDENS OF ESTE AND GONZAGA PRINCES 



shades. Ariosto, we learn from his son Virginio, was 

 very fond both of building and gardening, but since he 

 used the same methods that he did in writing verses and 

 was always altering his home and digging up his fruit 

 trees and vegetables, his operations seldom met with 

 success. 



" Never would he leave anything which he planted 

 more than three months in the same place. If he 

 sowed seeds or planted peach stones, he returned so 

 often to see if they were sprouting that he ended by 

 destroying the young shoots. And because he had 

 little knowledge of plants, he often mistook other 

 herbs which sprang up in the same border for those 

 which he had sown, and watched their growth daily 

 until it was impossible to have any doubt on the 

 subject. Once, I remember, he sowed some capers and 

 went to look at them every day, and was filled with 

 joy at the sight of his fine crop of plants. But in the 

 end he found that these were only shoots of elder, and 

 that not one of the capers had come up." 



The poet's last years were spent in a little house in 

 the Via Mirasole, the street that bears his name to-day, 

 with the Latin inscription over the door describing his 

 home as " small but fit for me, and hurtful to no one, 

 and built with my own money." This modest habi- 

 tation has outlived the splendours of Belfiore and 

 Belriguardo, and roses and carnations, oleanders and 

 fruit trees, still blossom under the red brick walls of 

 47 



