HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 
25 
about ten miles outside Florence, and originally was surrounded by beautiful gardens, of which 
practically nothing remains except a fine stairway and garden approach. The water for the villa 
was conducted by an immense aqueduct from the heights of Benistallo. Here were great planta¬ 
tions of mulberry-trees, which even to this day yield a considerable source of revenue, and parks 
containing rare animals bought in Spain and Egypt. The love of strange and rare animals was 
a curious feature of this age, and Lorenzo might be considered the founder of the zoological 
garden in the most elevated sense of the term. His prodigious activity extended to the collection 
of all kinds of birds and animals, pheasants whose descendants still people the park, pigs from 
Calabria, cows from India, and even giraffes and other curious animals, of which the travellers of 
the Renaissance brought home such fabulous descriptions. 
In his interesting and valuable work on the civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 
Burckhardt remarks the widespread interest in natural history, and the collection and comparative 
study of plants and animals. * Italy claims to be the first creator of botanical gardens, though 
possibly they may have served a chiefly practical end, and the claim to priority may be itself 
disputed. It is of far greater importance that princes and wealthy men, in laying out their 
pleasure gardens, instinctively made a point of collecting the greatest possible number of different 
plants in all their species and varieties. Thus, in the fifteenth century, the noble grounds of the 
Medicean Villa Careggi appear, from the descriptions we have of them, to have been almost a 
botanical garden, with countless specimens of different trees and shrubs. 1 Of the same kind was 
a villa of the Cardinal Trivulzio at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the Roman Campagna, 
towards Tivoli, with evidently something very different from the score or so of familiar medicinal 
plants which were to be found in the garden of any castle or monastery of Western Europe.’ 
‘ The collections, too, of foreign animals not only gratified curiosity, but served also the 
higher purposes of observation. The facility of transport from the southern and eastern harbours 
of the Mediterranean, and the mildness of the Italian climate, made it practicable to buy the 
largest animals of the South, or to accept them as presents from the sultans. The cities and 
princes were particularly anxious to keep live lions, even when the lion was not, as in Florence, 
an emblem of the State. The lion’s den was generally in or near the government palace, as in 
Perugia and Florence ; in Rome it lay on the slope of the Capitol; the beasts sometimes served 
as executioners of political judgments, and no doubt, apart from this, they kept alive a certain 
terror in the popular mind. Their condition was also held to be ominous of good or evil. . . . 
By the end of the fifteenth century, however, true menageries (serragli), now reckoned part of the 
suitable appointments of a court, were kept by many of the princes. “ It belongs to the position 
of the great,” says Matarazzo, “ to keep horses, dogs, mules, falcons and other birds, court jesters, 
singers, and foreign animals.”’ 
Some ten miles outside Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici built the villa at Poggio-a-Cajano, 
‘ Alexandri Braccii descriptio horti Laurentii Med.,’ printed in appendix to Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo. 
