THE GARDENS OF VENICE 
Padua and Cittadella, far from the noise and smoke 
of Rome. Farther still from Venice, in the distant hills 
of Friuli, Bembo’s kinsman, Giorgio Grademigo, spent 
the happiest days of his life in a villa at Cividale. 
“ Oh, how I enjoy my summer here ! ” he writes. “ I 
spend the whole evening, until two hours after sunset, 
walking about the fields, and the dawn of day never 
finds me in my bed. For at Cividale the sky is bluer, 
and the sun and stars seem to me to shine more brightly 
than in any other place on earth. Sickness is unknown 
there, and melancholy flies away.” 1 
A curious treatise on Venetian villas was written by 
the Florentine Antonio Doni, originally a Servite friar, 
who gave up his vows and sought refuge in Venice, 
where he became intimate with several of the above- 
named scholars, and spent his last years in a villa at 
Monselice. The writer divides Venetian country- 
houses into four classes—first, the superb palaces laid 
out on a vast scale by wealthy patricians, with frescoed 
halls and colonnades, chapel and cloisters; secondly, 
the more modest villas, where tired officials and over¬ 
worked scholars sought repose and leisure in the brief 
intervals which they could snatch from their public 
duties; thirdly, the houses and estates bought by 
merchants as a profitable investment; and fourthly, the 
podere cultivated by farmers and peasants, who made 
a living out of the soil. The villas ofBembo and 
1 L. Dolce, Lettere, ii. 467. 
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