CARDINAL BEMBO AND HIS VILLA 
breaks out perpetually in his writings, alike in prose 
and poetry. His youthful work, Gli Asolani , which 
he wrote at the Court of Ferrara, opens, as we 
have seen, with a charming description of Queen 
Caterina’s palace garden on the heights of Asolo, 
with its close - clipped hedges and marble loggia 
looking out on the Lombard plains. In his Roman 
days, we know how keenly Messer Pietro enjoyed ex¬ 
cursions into the Campagna, and how he rode out to 
Tivoli with Raphael and Count Baldassare and the 
Venetian patrician Andrea Navagero, to see all that 
was worth seeing, both new and old. And in the last 
years of his long life, it was still the aged Cardinal’s 
greatest pleasure to take a walk outside the Porta del 
Popolo, under the wooded slopes of Monte Mario. 
But the place which Bembo loved best in the world 
was his own villa, in the district of Cittadella near 
Padua—“ la mia dilettevola 'villetta nel Padovano ,” as he 
calls it repeatedly in his correspondence. This was a 
country house in the parish of Santa Maria di Non, not 
far from Castelfranco and Asolo, which took its name 
of Villa Bozza from a former owner, a valiant soldier 
of fortune, known as Bozza da Nona. It stood in the 
midst of pleasant gardens and meadows, watered by the 
river Brenta and its tributary, the Piovego, a small 
stream that flowed under the villa windows. About 
1475 this little property was bought by Pietro’s father, 
Bernardo Bembo, a noble Venetian who held high 
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