GARDENS OF ESTE AND GONZAGA PRINCES 
shades. Ariosto, we learn from his son Virginio, was 
very fond both of building and gardening, but since he 
used the same methods that he did in writing verses and 
was always altering his home and digging up his fruit 
trees and vegetables, his operations seldom met with 
success. 
“ Never would he leave anything which he planted 
more than three months in the same place. If he 
sowed seeds or planted peach stones, he returned so 
often to see if they were sprouting that he ended by 
destroying the young shoots. And because he had 
little knowledge of plants, he often mistook other 
herbs which sprang up in the same border for those 
which he had sown, and watched their growth daily 
until it was impossible to have any doubt on the 
subject. Once, I remember, he sowed some capers and 
went to look at them every day, and was filled with 
joy at the sight of his fine crop of plants. But in the 
end he found that these were only shoots of elder, and 
that not one of the capers had come up.” 
The poet’s last years were spent in a little house in 
the Via Mirasole, the street that bears his name to-day, 
with the Latin inscription over the door describing his 
home as “ small but fit for me, and hurtful to no one, 
and built with my own money.” This modest habi¬ 
tation has outlived the splendours of Belfiore and 
Belriguardo, and roses and carnations, oleanders and 
fruit trees, still blossom under the red brick walls of 
47 
