GENOESE VILLAS 
upper garden, give an airy elegance to the water-front, 
and make it, in combination with its mural paintings 
and stucco-ornamentation, and the sculpture of the gar- 
dens, one of the most villa-like of Italian villas. The 
gardens themselves descend in terraces to the shore, 
and contain several imposing marble fountains, among 
them one with a statue of Neptune, executed in 1600 by 
the Carloni, and supposed to be a portrait of the great 
Admiral. 
The house stands against a steep terraced hillside, 
formerly a part of the grounds, but now unfortunately 
divided from them by the railway cutting. A wide 
tapis vert still ascends the hill to a colossal Jupiter 
(under which the Admiral’s favourite dog is said to be 
buried); and when the villa is seen from the harbour one 
understands how necessary this stately terraced back- 
ground was to the setting of the low-lying building. 
Beautiful indeed must have been the surroundings of 
the villa when Evelyn visited it in 1644, and described 
the marble terraces above the sea, the aviary “wherein 
grew trees of more than two feet in diameter, besides 
cypress, myrtles, lentiscuses and other rare shrubs,” and 
“the other two gardens full of orange-trees, citrons and 
pomegranates, fountains, grots and statues.” All but 
the statues have now disappeared, yet much of the old 
garden-magic lingers in the narrow strip between house 
and sea. It is the glory of the Italian garden-architects 
that neglect and disintegration cannot wholly mar the 
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