House and Garden 
An addition of still later date is a long build¬ 
ing joined to the villa at right angles and run¬ 
ning the whole length of the garden to the 
north. Part of it is taken up by rooms and 
it ends in an eighteenth century rococo 
orangery and clock tower ornamented with 
stucco vases. 
The gardens were laid out in 1509 by 
Jacopo Salviati and remain as he planned 
them. They cover a long and wide terrace 
stretching 200 yards from the western walls 
of the house to a wood which covers the hill 
of La Pietra, a village three miles out of Flor¬ 
ence. The wide length of the terrace is 
divided in two by a little garden on a lower 
level, which cuts in, narrow and long, pro¬ 
tected on three sides by the creeper-covered 
walls of the terrace above; a garden in which 
pansies, forget-me-nots, tulips, and silene 
rosea grow, sheltered from every breath of 
cold wind, in formal beds round a little marble 
fountain. Busts of classically beautiful un¬ 
known celebrities look down from brackets on 
the wall. A charming little nook this, charm¬ 
ing to look down upon from the stone balus¬ 
trade of the terrace above, a pattern in bright 
colors, outlined by the dark green of box bor¬ 
ders, round the graceful fountain splashing 
and sparkling in the sunlight. There are 
several other fountains on the terrace, the 
largest carries a statue of a Jupiter Tonans 
standing on a high pedestal decorated with 
rams' heads, and forms the centre cf the ter¬ 
race near the house. Behind this Jupiter, 
against the wall of the wing, there is a graceful 
statue of a youth playing with a swan backed 
by a grotto of rocaille from which water flows 
into a semicircular basin; but neither of these 
fountains has the delicate charm of the one 
in the spring garden below. 
The flowers are laid out in a symmetrical 
pattern. Bushes of oleander, mimosa and 
pomegranates, some fine standard magnolias, 
a Japan medlar or two, have here and there 
outgrown the limits originally assigned to 
the m, two fine 
ilexes, clipped 
though they be, 
have spread their 
branches wider 
than was thought 
of in the original 
design, and a mag¬ 
nificent deodar 
was certainly not in 
J a c o p o Salviati’s 
plan, but these are 
the only changes. 
Sauntering in 
and out of the in¬ 
tricacies of those 
very beds, or lean¬ 
ing on the stones 
of that very balus¬ 
trade, Jacopo Sal- 
viati may have 
received the news 
on that 12th of Sep¬ 
tember, 1512, of the return, and the return in 
power of the Medici, after an exile of eighteen 
years. The Medici and Salviati were con¬ 
nected. A daughter of Lorenzo il Magnifico 
married a Salviati, and her daughter was soon 
to take Giovanni dei Medici (delle Bande 
Nere) to husband and to become the mother 
of Cosimo, first of the seven Medicean Grand 
Dukes. But still, there was that about the 
return of the Medici, after the horrors of the 
sack of Prato, that may have led Jacopo to 
look down the valley and measure the distance 
between bis fortress-like villa and those gates 
of Florence: gates which the power of Spain 
had opened for the returning tyrants, and eon- 
THE COURT OF THE VILLA 
75 
