CARDINAL BEMBO AND HIS VILLA 
and crowned by celestial spirits with a diadem of light. 
But henceforth his visits to the Villa were few and far 
between. Morosina and her children still spent the 
summer there, and Bembo joined them whenever he 
could snatch a few days from his official duties. “To-day 
I am at the Villa, and seem to be alive again,” he wrote 
one August to Gian Matteo at Venice. “ Here it is 
fresh and beautiful, and altogether delightful. I mean 
to stay here for a few days, and wish that you could 
leave your desk and come here with your boy Luigi.” 
But all too soon, sorrows came to darken this happy 
home. Bembo’s promising boy, Lucilio, died there one 
summer day in 1532, after a few hours’ illness. “I 
have lost my Lucilio,” the stricken father wrote to his 
old friend Avila, “ my sweet and charming boy, on 
whom, as you know, all the hopes of my house were 
set. I cannot tell you what grief this unexpected 
event has caused me. ... So in one moment all 
our hopes and dreams are shattered.” And in answer 
to Veronica Gambara’s letter of sympathy he wrote: 
“ Certainly I have lost a little son, who more than 
fulfilled every hope I had formed of his future 
although he was not yet nine years of age. But I try 
not to murmur at the Will of God, and since my 
flower was doomed to die so soon, at least I thank 
Heaven that he was all I could most desire.” 1 
1 Lettere, iii. 212, iv. 27. 
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