ITALIAN VILLAS 
woods, with a theatre cT eaux and stately flights of 
steps leading up to terraced ilex-groves ; but all this 
lower garden was turned into an English park in the 
first half of the nineteenth century. One of the finest 
of Roman gardens fell a sacrifice to this senseless change; 
for in beauty of site, in grandeur of scale, and in the 
wealth of its Roman sculpture, the Villa Pamphily was 
unmatched. Even now it is full of interesting fragments ; 
but the juxtaposition of an undulating lawn and dotty 
shrubberies to the stately garden-architecture about the 
villa has utterly destroyed the unity of the composition. 
There is a legend to the effect that Le Notre laid out 
the park of the Villa Pamphily when he came to Rome 
in 1678; but Percier and Fontaine, who declare that 
there is nothing to corroborate the story, point out that 
the Villa Pamphily was begun over thirty years before 
Le Notre’s visit. Absence of proof, however, means 
little to the average French author, eager to vindicate 
Le Notre’s claim to being the father not only of French, 
but of Italian landscape-architecture ; and M. Riat, in 
“ L’Art des Jardins,” repeats the legend of the Villa 
Pamphily, while Dussieux, in his “Artists Frangais a 
l’Etranger,” anxious to heap further honours on his com- 
patriot, actually ascribes to him the plan of the Villa 
Albani, which was laid out by Pietro Nolli nearly two 
hundred years after Le Notre’s visit to Rome ! Appa- 
rently the whole story of Le Notre’s laying out of Italian 
gardens is based on the fact that he remodelled some 
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