THE GARDENS OF PAPAL ROME 
Angelo Colocci, the head of the Academy, enter¬ 
tained the flower of Roman society at those happy 
meetings which Sadoleto recalled with tender regret, 
after the sack of Rome had destroyed the beauties of 
the Eternal City and scattered all his friends. Some¬ 
times the same pleasant company met in Blosio 
Palladio’s gardens on the Tiber banks, or in the house 
of the venerable German Bishop Goritz, near Trajan’s 
Forum. Sometimes they climbed the Janiculum, and 
were entertained by Baldassare Turini, the friend and 
executor of Raphael, in a villa which boasted of enjoy¬ 
ing the finest view in Rome. Phaedrus Inghirami, 
the learned librarian of the Vatican, whose massive 
brow and squinting eyes are familiar to us in Raphael’s 
portrait, bought a country-house on the Palatine and 
adorned its halls with fragments of old Roman frescoes, 
while Latino Giovenale Manetti, another member of 
the Urbino circle, set the fashion of decorating his 
garden walls with ancient inscriptions and classical 
reliefs. 
More famous than any of these was the villa of the 
Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi, in the Lungara, on 
the right bank of the Tiber, now known as the 
Farnesina. This simple two-storied building — in 
Vasari’s words, “ Non murato ma veramente nato ”— 
was an ideal pleasure-house for a merchant prince of 
Chigi’s type, who could afford to indulge his fine taste 
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