GARDENS OF ESTE AND GONZAGA PRINCES 
entertained his future son-in-law, Lodovico Sforza, and 
his two brothers, and two blind poets sang and played 
the lyre while the Duke and his guests were at supper 
in the loggia. 
In these early years Ercole built the grand marble 
stairway of the Corte Vecchia, one of the few memorials 
of his reign still in existence, and laid out the Barco 
and Barchetto. The Barchetto was a wooded enclosure 
to the east of the villa of Belfiore, with a round fish¬ 
pond and marble loggia, surrounded by tall poplars and 
fruit trees, which no one might touch without incurring 
heavy penalties. The laying out of the vast hunting 
ground known as the Barco involved the destruction of 
many houses and churches between the north wall of 
the city and the banks of the Po. This New Forest of 
the Este princes was peopled with stags, gazelles, ante¬ 
lopes, and wild boars, as well as with the leopards and 
spotted giraffes to which Niccolo da Correggio alludes in 
his fable of Psyche. During the war of 1482, when the 
Duke lay ill in the Castello, the Venetian invaders 
planted the banner of St. Mark in the Barco, killed the 
deer and peacocks, and carried off the giraffes and leo¬ 
pards to Venice. It was a terrible moment in the history 
of Ferrara. But when peace was restored a new era of 
prosperity dawned, and Ercole returned to his favourite 
pursuits with fresh vigour. “ The Duke,” complained 
one of his subjects, “ thinks of nothing but the embel- 
37 
