VILLA GIUSTI, VERONA 
(PALACE OF STRA, NEAR VERONA) 
PLATES 24, 25 
was somewhat disappointing, after a long search in the Public Library at 
Verona, to be unable to discover any old engravings or views showing the 
original condition and design of these gardens. To look at them as they 
exist to-day, there can be no doubt that at one time they were amongst the 
finest town gardens in the North of Italy, but apparently no actual record of 
their design now remains. Charles de Brasses, the worthy Dijon magistrate, 
writing of Verona, in 1739, says:—‘Among the private buildings, the finest 
are the palaces of the Pompei and the Mafifei, but the Giusti gardens gave me more pleasure; for 
they are full of rockeries and grottos and endless terraces covered with little circular temples, 
from which one commands the town and all the course of the Adige. To the left the view is 
interminable; on the right it is bounded by the mountains of the Tyrol. The quantities of 
gigantically tall cypresses, in which these gardens abound, give a most striking look to the spot, 
worthy of one in which the magicians of old held their sabbaths. I got lost in a maze, and I 
was an hour wandering around under a blazing sun, and would have been there still had I not 
been taken out by one of the people of the place.’ 1 The maze and the parterres have now all 
disappeared ; but the central cypress walk, with its gigantic spirelike trees towering high above, is 
worth going far to see : above rise terraces, each presenting a view more beautiful than the last, of 
Verona, with its palaces, churches, and tall campanile standing out against the soft distance of plain 
and the blue hills beyond. 
The palace itself stands quite on the street, and, entering under an archway, we find the 
square cortile with high surrounding walls. From the centre the eye is led up the long vista of 
the cypress walk, and on either side are fountains, one of which is illustrated on plate 25. Here 
and there, dotted round the garden, are fragments of statuary and vases, which served to mark 
the boundaries of the older parterre; and high up on the rock face, at the termination of the 
cypress walk, is a huge grotesque face carved in the solid rock, supporting a balcony above. It is 
to be regretted that so beautiful a spot, in the midst of Verona, should have suffered so much 
Selections from the Letters of de Brosses, translated by Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, 1897. 
( 63 ) 
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