CARDINAL BEMBO AND HIS VILLA 



breaks out perpetually in his writings, alike in prose 

 and poetry. His youthful work, Gli Asolani, which 

 he wrote at the Court of Ferrara, opens, as we 

 have seen, with a charming description of Queen 

 Caterina's palace garden on the heights of Asolo, 

 with its close - clipped hedges and marble loggia 

 looking out on the Lombard plains. In his Roman 

 days, we know how keenly Messer Pietro enjoyed ex- 

 cursions into the Campagna, and how he rode out to 

 Tivoli with Raphael and Count Baldassare and the 

 Venetian patrician Andrea Navagero, to see all that 

 was worth seeing, both new and old. And in the last 

 years of his long life, it was still the aged Cardinal's 

 greatest pleasure to take a walk outside the Porta del 

 Popolo, under the wooded slopes of Monte Mario. 



But the place which Bembo loved best in the world 

 was his own villa, in the district of Cittadella near 

 Padua " la mia dilettevola villetta net Padovano" as he 

 calls it repeatedly in his correspondence. This was a 

 country house in the parish of Santa Maria di Non, not 

 far from Castelfranco and Asolo, which took its name 

 of Villa Bozza from a former owner, a valiant soldier 

 of fortune, known as Bozza da Nona. It stood in the 

 midst of pleasant gardens and meadows, watered by the 

 river Brenta and its tributary, the Piovego, a small 

 stream that flowed under the villa windows. About 

 1475 tn i s littk property was bought by Pietro's father, 

 Bernardo Bembo, a noble Venetian who held high 

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