ITALIAN GARDENS OF THE RENAISSANCE 
poets and scholars who fed at the Pope’s table were 
dismissed. Silence reigned in the vast halls where 
his Holiness lived alone with two dull Flemish 
chamberlains and employed an old peasant woman 
to cook his meals. 
When the ambassadors asked leave to see the 
Belvedere, they were kept waiting over an hour while 
the Pope sent for the keys of his private door, by 
which alone access to the villa could be gained, since 
he had ordered the other eleven entrances to be closed. 
The priceless antiques which adorned the Cortile were 
in Adrian’s eyes but Pagan idols, which, as the 
Venetian Negri remarked, he would gladly have 
broken up and ground into lime for use in the 
building of St. Peter’s. But when once admittance 
had been obtained, the ambassadors were lost in 
wonder and delight. They walked through Bramante’s 
colonnades and Raphael’s brilliantly decorated loggia, 
still in part unfinished, to the villa and looked down 
on the churches and palaces of the Eternal City with 
the many-coloured plains of the Campagna and Alban 
Hills beyond—“a place indeed,” they exclaimed, 
“worthy of the name Belvedere." Here they found 
themselves in the fairest garden in the world, laid out 
with grassy lawns and groves of laurel, cypress, and 
mulberry trees, and adorned with fountains of sparkling 
waters. Then they passed through a lofty portico, 
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