GENOESE VILLAS 
Bernini was the great exponent of this new impulse, 
though it may be traced back as far as Michelangelo. 
It was Bernini who first expressed in his fountains the 
tremulous motion and shifting curves of water, and who 
put into his garden-sculpture that rustle of plein air 
which the modern painter seeks to express in his land- 
scapes. To trace the gradual development of this rap- 
prochement to nature at a period so highly artificial 
would be beyond the scope of these articles ; but in 
judging the baroque garden architecture and sculpture 
of the late Renaissance, it should be remembered that 
they are not the expression of a wilful eccentricity, but 
an attempted link between the highly conventionalized 
forms of urban art and that life of the fields and woods 
which was beginning to charm the imagination of poets 
and painters. 
On the height above the Acqua Sola gardens, on the 
eastern side of Genoa, lies Alessi’s other great country 
house, the Villa Pallavicini alle Peschiere — not to be 
confounded with the ridiculous Villa Pallavicini at Pegli, 
a brummagem creation of the early nineteenth century, 
to which the guide-books still send throngs of unsus- 
pecting tourists, who come back imagining that this 
tawdry jumble of weeping willows and Chinese pagodas, 
mock Gothic ruins and exotic vegetation, represents the 
typical “Italian garden,” of which so much is said and 
so little really known. 
The Villa Pallavicini alle Peschiere (a drawing of 
'85 
