CARDINAL BEMBO AND HIS VILLA 
Santo, where he housed his priceless treasures of 
art, the paintings by Raphael and Bellini, by Man¬ 
tegna and Memling, the bronzes and marbles, the 
gems and rare manuscripts, which he had collected. 
But although he adorned this town house with a 
lovely garden and terraces of orange and lemon 
trees, and planted a grove where his favourite 
nightingales made their nests, he always escaped to 
the Villa in the early spring and lingered there until, 
on All Saints’ Day, the University term opened with 
High Mass in the Cathedral. 
His life there was brightened by the companion¬ 
ship of Morosina, the beautiful young girl who had 
lived with him in Rome, and who, until her death 
in 1535, was the cherished partner of his home and 
the mother of his children, although he never made 
her his wife. Bembo, as he sometimes found it 
necessary to remind his correspondents, was not a 
priest. Like many of his contemporaries, he had 
only taken minor orders to enable him to hold 
ecclesiastical benefices, and in this age of lax morals 
the irregularity of the connection gave no cause for 
scandal. The guests who came and went at the 
Villa, the friends who shared Bembo’s intimacy, 
treated her exactly as if she had been his legal wife. 
Rodolfo Pio of Carpi, the young Protonotary De 
Rossi, Trifone Gabriele, and Molza talked and 
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