ITALIAN GARDENS OF THE RENAISSANCE 
they can manage the lives of others better than their 
own. You need not be afraid that the charms of these 
ladies will make me forget myself. For I am not as 
great a fool as your Solomons would make out.” 1 
The issue proved him to have been right. From 
Urbino he passed, after Duke Guidobaldo’s death, to 
Rome, and through the influence of his friend Giuliano 
de Medici became secretary to Pope Leo X. But 
wherever he was, at Ferrara with Duchess Lucrezia, or 
at Urbino with Elisabetta Gonzaga and Emilia Pia, 
young Bembo was never so happy as when he could 
escape to the country for a few weeks. “I write to 
your Highness,” he says in a letter to Lucrezia from 
Ercole Strozzi’s villa, “sitting at an open window, 
looking out on the sweet and fresh landscape and com¬ 
mend myself to you as many times as there are leaves 
in the garden.” 2 In the Council hall at Venice, he 
confesses that he sighed for a little shepherd’s hut on 
the Apennine slopes, whence he could look down on 
the towers of Urbino; and the letters of his adored 
Duchess came to him like a refreshing breeze from 
those dear hills. This passionate delight in country 
sights and sounds, in the song of the first nightingale 
and the coming of the swallow, in the daily wonder of 
sunrise and sunset, and the miracle of the spring, 
1 Lettere, ii. 17. The quotations from Bembo’s Letters are taken 
from the edition published at Verona in 1552. 
2 Ibid. iv. 116. 
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