THE GARDENS OF ITALY. 
53 
CHAPTER V. 
VILLA MEDICI, ROME. 
T here is no building more familiar than this great cream-coloured villa, with its two 
small square towers, which, rising on the Pincian hill against a rich green background 
of ilex and stone pine, looks out over the city of Rome, across a close-cut grove, 
wherein a fountain splashes into a wide basin of brown masonry. Here St. Peter’s 
is framed in the sunset view, as a purple dome against a flaming sky. 
Twice a week the heavy gate turns on its hinges to admit visitors ; the surly old guard, a 
former soldier of France, passes you in. You are on French territory, and you pass up the shadowy 
way, dark even on a summer’s day, as the guest of the French Academy. As an approach to the 
villa a broad walk leads along a terrace, bounded by a low wall veiled in spring and summer 
by a mass of pink monthly roses. Part is now shut in bv overgrown trees, but part is kept, 
as, no doubt, it all was originally, as a sort of quarter-deck from which to enjoy the prospect to 
the full. The view from the Villa Medici is not more magnificent to the eye than it is suggestive 
to the mind. It is the centre of a panorama of Rome, and from it almost everv point of interest 
may be discerned — monuments, palaces and churches, the Colosseum in the distance, even the 
far-off aqueducts and the horizon line of mountains. The position, the most beautiful in Rome, 
66. -THE VILLA MEDICI. 
