BRENTANO'S! Inc’, NEW2YORK 2 PRINTED IN'FRANCS WITHDRAWN THE DORA A. GILL MEMORIAL COLLECTION 1871 - 1954 Founder and first president of The Garden Club of Ohio, Inc. A gift tothe Cleveland Public Library from The Garden Club of Ohio Founded in 1927 ar a / Ou Las BAC Bi Spe lie re e SN D D AE wi) Yo Le er SE an de MeN LY LL ay THE GARDENS OF ROME BY THE SAME AUTHOR LITERATURE ANG ENS GIS SERIE “ee. bn ad 00 B= sc 1 vol. small octavo Jean-Jacques Rousseau en Dauphiné .. .. .. I vol. a Chateaubriand (Voyage en Italie) .. … wk. I vol. — : Chateaubriand (Voyage au Mont-Blanc) .. .. .. I vol. — VOLUMES DE LUXE AURA EACS ALTO EN SERRE Go 0a bso I vol. quarto. Ea yRoutexdes Dolomites) =2) ses) een ee 1 vol — Au Pays de saint François d'Assise .. .. .. TaVOL EE Au Pays de sainte Catherine de Sienne .. .. Ravel, = Relerina ges Daiphinois-m meses antes x vol — SUPRAQVIA SE MILIAE ee CRE TAVOl ae ihheseBankcrotwlvho ne meersaer aes ere ees NOR JuLtes REY, PUBLISHER, GRENOBLE GABRIEL FAURE THE GARDENS OF ROME TRANSLATED BY FRANCK KEMP WATER-COLOURS BY PIERRE VIGNAL BRENTANO’S Inc. NEW-YORK 1924 PRINTED 1N FRANCE Published also in French by Epitions J. REY, GRENOBLE PRINTED IN FRANCE I TT = iF + SR em Se 11 A PIERRE ve NOLHAC de l’Académie Française ROMANO : ET | AMICO Mais tout autre est l'ennui de mon âme fidèle ; Rome, dont tu souffrais, je ne regrette qu'elle ; — Ma jeunesse est là-bas, prés du Tibre latin. A Joachim du Bellay, Pierre ve Nornac. an / ww JO Ak me ————_——————— eo TE —————— _ —— SAIS TER Pc à 5 ÿ a Van ROME —- THE Forum gm A Ts nes Patte RE Rs SR ren RE Rae EE The Forum and the Capitol. THE GARDENS OF ROME CHAPTER ONE THE ROMANS AND THE FEELING FOR NATURE have described, in the beginning of my book on the Italian Lakes, I the inspiration I sometimes find in those two words : how, in feverish Paris, I have merely to hear them pronounced, to feel at once my heart begin to beat, and to be immediately and irresistibly assailed by a desire to set out on my travels. But there are other words of just as potent a charm : I mean, in particular, those names of Roman gardens, names whose syllables are musical and magical as no others are, the names of those villas of Tivoli and Frascati on the slopes of the Alban and Sabine D RE RTE EC SRE SN EE SOS - — _ ee — = — - =: 2 S ae = He Re — | TO THE GARDENS OF ROME Temple of the Magna Mater, on the Palatine hills, where, two thousand years ago, Horace found it good to be alive. The Romans of course were admirers and lovers of the country from a very early date. I should not like to go the length of saying that they had as strong a feeling for nature as we have, but I believe as has often been asserted. Human feelings are for the most part eternal,and are only modified impercep- tibly, in the course of centuries. And when historians tell us that the in- habitants of ancient Rome went to the country either in order to find rest from the troubles and fatigues of life in the capital, or in order to be in the fashion, I cannot see where they differed, in this, from a great number of our contempo- raries. On the contrary, Iam confirmed in my belief that things are pretty much a = ae THE GARDENS OF ROME IT where they were. Here, for example, are some words of Seneca, addressed to the wealthy of his time, words that might almost have been signed by a writer of our day : “ Will there be no end to your arrogance till there is never a lake but is dominated by your villas, never a stream whose banks are not crowded with your mansions? Wherever a hot spring bubbles from the earth, there in all haste you must go building for your pleasures; wherever a river throws a graceful arm round a hill, there you have reared a palace; and dry land alone not contenting you, you have carried your masonry of esplanades and pavilions into the midst of the waves themselves. ” The atrocious casino at Nice is not the first, it seems, to have dishonoured the shores of the Latin sea. In the days of Augustus, as in our-day, the less wealthy class of writers and artists were content with unpretentious residences. Not every one had the wealth which allowed a Pliny to possess several country- houses in different parts of Italy. When Suetonius, a poor man, for all his historical works — erudition was no better paid then than now — thinks he would like to have a little property of his own, it is to Pliny he applies : and the latter commissions one of his agents to find what is wanted in Entrance to the Regia, in the Forum. BS | 12 THE GARDENS OF ROME f these words : ‘‘ A worker like Suetonius only wants a little place where he can be quiet and enjoy looking about him. A flower-bed or two, a shady walk to take his ease in, a few vine-stocks, and as many trees as he can ? easily remember, will meet all his needs.” Where is the vast difference in this from what might be the ideal of many a man-of-letters of our day? I think of the garden preferred by Jules Lemaitre to any amount of celebrated and magnificent scenery : ‘ I know a great orchard sloping down to a brook, and beside the brook a line of willows and poplars; the finest landscape in the world, I think it; for the sufficient reason that I love it and it knows me. ” ; Nevertheless, we must not exaggerate. It is only in comparatively recent times that nature has been experienced as a need and sought for her own sake; and to my mind Virgil’s is perhaps the only name in all Roman literature which we can associate with a feeling of this sort. His feeling towards nature was not merely, like that of Horace, a literary man’s enjoyment of an epicurean pic-nic; he really felt the charm of country life and the poetry of the country-man’s toil; he loved the hidden spring, the midday sleep under a tree, , the murmur of bees in the flowering hedges, the cooing of doves; é he was moved to see farm- house chimneys smoking against the evening sky, and the shadows \ { | | { | hg of the hills lengthening on the plain . as the sun descended. \ | | The Piazza del Popolo and the Gardens of the Pincio. a | ROME — THE FORUM f i qf eee a Ss, jp va sas ~~ Palace of the Vestal Vir ns, and Basilica of Constantine. CHAPTER TWO THE GARDENS OF ANCIENT ROME E can make a tolerable picture for ourselves of the wealthy villas of | which we read in Seneca by means of the long and particular des- criptions of his own villas given by Pliny. What strikes us most in these descriptions is the number of buildings and the refinement of comfort. Of this we shall find the most magnificent example when we visit Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli; but due allowance being made for individualities of pro- portion, the general system of structure and decoration will be found to \ have been everywhere the same. i Unfortunately, in the case of the gardens in which we are here more particularly interested, we are met, in trying to reconstruct them in \ Q q 4 i our m5 — er apa ma end D — 7 ECE ee 14 THE GARDENS OF ROME imagination as they were in reality, by the difficulty that nothing of this original state has subsisted, and that the few topographical documents found in Rome or Pompeii are extremely insignificant. A palace can be approximatively reconstructed from a ruined wing, remains of founda- tions, or a building plan; but what remains of a garden that has gone to Cypresses of the Villa Mills, on the Palatine. seed for several centuries? We needs must have recourse to the scanty information to be culled from literature; and here, once more, Pliny is our surest stand-by. We know that the Romans were fond of trees ranged in symmetrical order; but they had not the variety of species which we cultivate to-day. Above all, they were much more ignorant of flowers, THE GARDENS OF ROME T5 the East, at a later date, being their chief source of supply in this respect. ‘ The main lines ” writes M. Paléologue ‘‘ are pricked out in rows of giant pines. Pines crown the heights; pines mark the background. Thick-set hedges, myrtles, boxwood or laurels are trained to look like walls. Parallel rows of evergreen oaks make a vault of their over-arching branches. The spreading avenues of cypress are like porticos. And lastly, the flights of stairs, the balustrades, the hemicycles, the basins, the urns, the caryatides, the hermæ, scattered here and there and making together a great array of Nymphæum in the Domus Augustiana, on the Palatine. ‘marble, stamp the whole with a thoroughly architectural character. The Roman park, in short, is a continuation of Roman masonry, an adaptation of nature to the needs of domestic life; nature in her untram- meled state is excluded. Flower-beds, groves, well-trimmed box-wood alleys, ornamental waters, the whole scheme of the scenery is brought under the laws of perspective and of geometry. A Roman proprietor ! prized above everything the pleasure of the eye afforded by his estate. And wild landscapes were not at all to his taste. I do not forget Cicero’s a Se a ne CI eee a eae ee ——— 2 16 THE GARDENS OF ROME praises of the rocks of his villa at Arpinum, on those rugged foot-hills of the Abruzzi; but he made only short stays there and was never long | absent from Tusculum; the proximity of Rome, the air of the suburbs, i the subarbanum of which he is fond of speaking, being, as Gaston Boissier has well said, a necessity to him. The criticisms of Seneca, cited above, indicate that the Romans were particularly fond of the shores of lakes, rivers, and the sea, as sites for | their country-houses. But many of them were unable to pitch their tents | so far from the capital. The heights of the Alban and Sabine hills, from which they could overlook what was then the fruitful plain of Latium and could see Rome on the horizon, became their favourite holiday resorts. We shall find still standing at Tivoli and Frascati, the ruins of : Tibur and Tusculum, where, sixteen centuries before the cardinals of the | ie Renaissance, the friends of Maecenas watched the sun descending into i | the sea behind the towers and cupolas of the Eternal City. q Ruins of the Wall of Romulus, on the Palatine. À % oo ae, The Palatine, seen from Santa Prisc. CHAPTER THREE IN THE RUINS OF THE FORUM AND THE PALATINE N Rome itself, the pride of a few rich men of the empire was respon- I sible for the creation of those great gardens whose sites are more or less accurately known to us. Lucullus built on the Pincio. The con- queror of Mithridates had brought back some new species of trees from Asia, particularly cherry trees. Is it possible that those still to be seen on certain terraces of the Villa Medici, are the far-off descendants of those planted by the famous epicurean? M. René Schneider has put forward the conjecture. “ The jealousy of the Senate had forced him to wait a year for his triumph. He consoled himself, doubtless, in the enjoyment of those cool berries, berries as purple as the conqueror’s toga, and still unknown to the epicures among the Quirites. ” After the orgies of Lucullus these gardens were the scene of the debauches of Messalina, who was put to THE GARDENS OF ROME 18 death at last in those very groves where she had indulged in so many sensual excesses. Sallust, likewise, laid out gardens of an incredible luxuriousness on this spot, which is occupied to-day by the palace of the Queen-Mother. But of all these splendours, there was but little left after the prime of the Roman Empire. Incorporated for a while in the “ vineyard” of the Convent of Santa Maria del Popolo, the former gardens of Lucullus were gradually over- Entrance to the Villa Mill,s on the Palatine. that they would to-day be buried under houses of five or six stories a-piece, and “palaces”’,had it not been for the energy of a certain great prefect, who, under the administration of Napoleon Ist, prevented the sacrilege. In the city where one of his great-grand-uncles, my fellow-townsman, the ee ETS run by hovels. And there can be no doubt Ancient Remains in the Communal Museum. THE GARDENS OF ROME 19 The Caelius seen from the Castello dei Cesari. illustrious Cardinal de Tournon, dean of the Sacred College, had just missed being made Pope, the Baron Camille de Tournon fulfilled the functions of Prefect of the Tiber, in the five years (1809-1814) during which Rome was the chief town of a hundred and thirty French departments. The city still remembers his efforts to embellish it. and parti- cularly, his efforts to endow it with gardens. It was he who presided at the installation of the Académie de France in the Villa Medicis, whose park he was the means of preserving, as well as that of the Villa Borghese. The impressive balustrade, designed by the architect Valadier, which runs up from the Piazza del Popolo, was likewise an idea of Tournon’s. ; j The Villa Mills on the Palatine. SRE) ZT 20 THE GARDENS OF ROME Of the vineyards on Monte Pincio, he made those handsome modern gardens, whose walks were already laid out when Pius VIT returned to Rome; the latter had only to set up his arms at the entrance, along with the pompous inscription that may be still read there. M. Madelin’s fine portrait of the young and brilliant prefect, shows him enjoying the life of Rome, and even a little intoxicated by the defer- ry illa Dovia~-Pamphili. à Cascade in the Park of the V ence paid him. We see him wandering over the Roman countryside and in those gardens of Tivoli and Frascati, where we shall shortly follow him. ‘ Bewitching villas on Alban mountains or Sabine hills! There is rapture in the very sight of them! Let the Sirocco blow from Rome; in those gardens where the water ripples over the endless terraces, under the shade of palms and evergreen oaks, it is good to be alive. And when evening comes, our charming prefect sits down to write to his relatives : dashes off, for their benefit, sketches of that incomparable scenery, descriptions which should be read in his own words; and ever and anon has glimpses, at the end of some vista, of his city, crouching far-off on the great plain, ON THE PALATINE | = be q | | q , % ON POE LE ee ins Mihai ina Ta. 5% Shr prem n aD es aS A ced of ere ls RSI MS nue age BE Re nl eme EN CLR = oon SSB wo TS ner ee THE GARDENS OF ROME 27 and can guess at his Forum, where his workmen are busy digging up the Rome of antiquity. ” It was, as a matter of fact, the Baron Camille de Tournon, who began the clearing of the Forum and the Palatine, which had been abandoned by the Popes to goats and oxen. We owe him our best thanks for this, for it is only there that we come into contact with ancient Rome, the The Garden of the Vatican. ancient gardens no longer existing. Coming down from the tiny hill where stand the She-Wolf and the Capitol of Tarquin, we cannot but be thrilled to find ourselves in the Forum, that Forum from which the Roman arm stretched into every corner of the earth. Here stood, at the meeting-place of many roads the famous Milliarium Aureum, on which were written the distances of the principal towns of the empire from the capital. The Forum, as its name indicates, was at first only a humble fair- ground or market-place, the centre of the commercial and subsequently of the political life of the city. The first Romans chose a site near the Tiber, on low-lying and rather marshy ground. The custom of crossing si —— - — = — SSS —= _————e ——— ZEN eme ee —————— ec = == = = = 22 THE GARDENS OF ROME this ground bare-footed was long maintained, even after the marsh had entirely dried up. Ovid, in his Fasti, tells of his astonishment at this custom. “ One day ” he says, ‘‘ I was returning from the festival of Vesta, À { | and had come to where the new road joins the Roman Forum. There I saw a matron, coming down the hill, bare-footed; I stopped in silent 4 surprise. An old woman of the neighbourhood saw my astonishment, M an a - hii Fe Court of the Thermae Museum. asked me to sit down, and nodding her head, spoke thus, in her shaky voice : Where the Forum you see now stands were once marshes. The river had overflowed and made a lake. To-day the ground is firm and the se Re ee EEE ae me 5 THE GARDENS OF ROME 23 altars stand on dry land. In the Vela- brum, on the road by which to-day the charioteers go to the Circus, were only willows and shivering reeds... The stagnant waters have withdrawn; the river stays within its banks; but the old custom of crossing the ground bare- footed remains. ”’ There, then, in that hollow which lies at the foot of the Palatine hill, and is so gay with flowers on days of Spring, began the life of Rome. Of the buildings in it, certain houses of reli- gion were the first to arise, notably the Regia, where the Pontifex Maximus had his seat, and the temple of Vesta, Fountain by Bernini, in the Villa Borghese, Re SR TR, ane MEN him om. Dub: ee 24 THE GARDENS OF ROME where the College of Vestals kept diligent guard over the sacred fire. The priestesses had their lodging reserved for them beside the sanctuary : this palace is one of those which have suffered least at the hands of time and of men, and can be comparatively easily reconstituted in ima- gination. A huge rectangular court, with a colonnade running round it, occupied the centre of the building; and here there marble cisterns received and stored the rain-water, for there was an ancient law forbid- Michael Angelo’s Cypress in the Court of the Thermae Museum. ding the Vestals to use river-water. The deep veneration in which those virgins were held is well known, and how they were expected to keep alive the sacred flame and prepare the accessories of the sacrifices. The highest honours were theirs by right; the chariot of the Consul himself yielded place to theirs; theirs was the right of granting pardon; any insult or offense offered to their persons was punishable by death. But on the other hand, the law showed itself merciless to anyone of their number who broke her vow of chastity; she was buried alive in a vault. Beside this primary forum, which was so to speak the religious Cl nr en, ees A i 7 THE GARDENS OF ROME 25 religious centre of primitive Rome, another forum was not long in making its appearance and becoming the centre of political and social life. The government in those days was an oligarchy ; a number of patricians represented the nation and their Curia formed the first senate. For the humble edifice in which they originally assembled, Czesar substituted a more luxurious palace, which having been in its turn destroyed by fire, was reconstructed by Diocletian, the new buildings surviving almost intact till the day when Pope Honorius converted them into St Adriano’s church But how many people, looking at this church standing there in a corner of the Forum, realise that those mean walls once sheltered the sittings of that senate from which for centuries went forth the decrees that settled the affairs of the universe? When the monopoly of the management of political life passed from priests and nobles into the hands of the people, the Forum, as the special reservation of the plebs, entered on a period of sudden development. A number of basilicas — huge squares, that is to say, with rows of columns 4 | 1 AS 26 THE GARDENS OF ROME round them — were erected and used for popular assemblies, electoral meetings, courts of justice. Then, too arose the Rostra, those witnesses of the great battles of political eloquence; the tribune was a kind of platform, on which the orator could pace up and down, in accordance with a custom still favoured by many public-speakers and even by some Villa Médici : Garden-front. preachers. The iron rostrum of ships (rostra), spoils of victories at sea, adorned this primitive tribune, which was so often the scene of the first and last acts of the political dramas of the hour. ‘‘ Here ” says M. Herriot ‘“ were exposed the head of the Consul Octavius, the victims of Marius, the corpses of Sylla and of Clodius. Here were affixed the twelve tables of the law. On that platform, with the arcades under it, Caius Gracchus has spoken, lashing the crowd to fury with his loud, strident voice.What man is that who walks guarded by soldiers and slaves? His big red jowl, sprinkled with white spots, is swollen with rage. It is Sylla himself. ”’ Caesar, later on, had Rostra of a more expensive kind constructed on the place where their remains can still be seen to-day; the walls of the tribune were covered with marble and surrouned with an elegant balus- THE GARDENS OF THE VATICAN de = So THE GARDENS OF ROME 27 trade. If these new Rostra did not see the great battles for the conquest of public and private liberties which had made their predecessors, famous they heard speeches as magnificent and took part in scenes as tragic. There was exposed the dead body of the Cæsar who had built them. There was exhibited, by Antony’s assassins, the head of Cicero, who, a few years before, had delivered his Phillippics on that very spot. These ruins are far more thrilling to us than those of the palaces and ostentatious edifices built at a later date by the emperors. When I am in the mood to spend some hours in the Forum, it is not Triumphal Arches or temples reared in honour of victories that hold me enchained, but rather those humble fragments of the primitive buildings in which in very truth was born that prodigious and well-nigh inexplicable thing we call “ the might of Rome ” At several points, traces have been found of the rampart of Koma quadrata, then only the mere agricultural township of which Montesquieu speaks : ‘‘ When we think of Rome as it was in its beginnings, we must not imagine a town after the pattern of those we see to-day, unless indeed we have in mind those of the Crimea, towns planned with the Fountain in the Villa Borghese. né 28 THE GARDENS OF ROME unique purpose of containing booty, cattle, and the fruits of the earth. ” Later on, when Rome spread herself out over her six other hills, the Palatine, with its historic soil, was coveted as a building site by those who had political ambitions in the city. Augustus had his house there, a simple and modest house, which he kept even in the days of his supreme power. Near at hand was the house of Livia, a small house this, also, but adorned with superb frescoes, which are reckoned among the finest un- earthed in Italy. And here, as in the Forum, the scanty remains of those two houses are of greater worth to us than the walls of the luxurious palaces erected on the Palatine by Caligula, Domitian, and Septimus Severus. And the marshes of the Tiber! — what would we not give to come upon some trace of them, too, in some corner of the old Forum, those marshes which were already almost forgotten in the days of Ovid! To-day the willows and reeds have been succeeded by a whole vege- tation which flourishes vigorously among the marble fragments and was ÿ Lakalet in the Villa Borghese. still more vigorous in recent centuries, when it covered all the ruins. For sheer intoxication of enjoyment there is nothing to equal a saunter in the à Forum, on a fine spring morning, when the young green shoots are begin- | ning to show everywhere, or on the Palatine, on a June evening, when a THE GARDENS OF ROME 29 Water-basin at the Entrance to the Villa Medici. wash of golden vapour swims about the motionless cypresses of the Villa Mills. One of Anatole France’s characters regrets the times when flocks of sheep nibbled the grass on the buried Forum. “A white ox, with wide brow and spreading horns, was chewing the cud in the empty field; a shepherd dozed at the foot of a high column, half- buried in weeds. And one could not help reflecting: here the fate of the world hung in the balance. Since it ceased to be the Campo Vaccino, the Fo- rum is ruined for poets and lovers. ” This person in Sur z Garden of the Villa Medici. la pierre blanche exaggerates DA ky War Male ties FP \ 30 THE GARDENS OF ROME what was merely a passing feeling on the part of the writer who time and again has congratulated, in quite a contrary sense, the learned and delightful Giacomo Boni on the marvellous account to which he turned these celebrated ruins by his clever furtherance of the work of nature. Side by side with the thousand flowers of the field, whose names I shall never know, and which have crept in between the stones wherever there is the slightest trace of mould, Boni has sown the classical plants and trees : the pine, laurel, myrtle, hawthorn, ivy, acanthus, lilac, laburnum, rose, and a few other species of which there is mention in Latin authors. All this vegetation minglés so harmoniously with the grasses and weeds, with the red clover, violets, periwinkles, and buttercups, that it becomes easy to believe oneself in some old forsaken pleasure garden. On certain May al mornings, when the sun lights up the marbles and calls forth the buds, a troop of nymphs and young rustic deities seem to have taken possession ! of these once solemn and tragic precincts; and it would be no astonishment to see advancing, round the corner of any of those temples, the train of revellers, with their hands full of flowers, as in the Primavera of Botticelli. GES > té 33 Ee LR A AR nn NU 0 General View of the Vatican Garden. n Leal © = A de = x À = i > | i | H | 1 | y a Ne Te EOS, Es ‘ Sg EL PE PASS TE SPP EF me pre tai Rance Bee SERS Bs anette: op Redan re US os ey sene ske Sete, ee A OT Avenue in the Villa Borghese. CHAPTER FOUR ON THE TERRACES OF THE PINCIO s it not rather those inspired years of the Renaissance that are I symbolised by Botticelli’s joyous goddess : those years when Italy shook off the gloom of the Middle Ages, and the love of life and of beauty returned once more to flourish magnificently on Italian soil? It was a period of luxury and of art; the pursuit of pleasure, of all the pleasures, became the chief and often the only motive of existence. The taste for nature and for gardens revived; at Rome and in its neighbourhood splendid villas sprang up. When we visit those at Tivoli and Frascati, whose distance from the great city permitted their better preservation in their original state, I shall try to indicate the features belonging essen- tially to each. The gardens of Rome have been endlessly changed and ch i 4 il Se Se ae aera Saas _ a, ee fees | 32 THE GARDENS OF ROME transformed; and there are perhaps, only three or four of them in which something of the soul of things past still lives. On the Pincio, this soul is almost entirely wanting, the gardens, as I have said before, being barely a century old. But they have such a marvellous situation that a visit to Rome would be incomplete without a dl walk on their terraces, which jut out over the Piazza del Popolo like the Pou ram of a great ship, just as the Giardino di Fronte, at Perugia, juts out over the valley of the Tiber and the plain of Umbria. How often here have I watched the decline of day ! How many poets have done likewise | before me! And how many will do likewise in the future! Nowhere can aR be better appreciated that famous Roman light, the inspiration of so Hi many painters and poets, whose magic, according to Chateaubriand, | 14 has been more successfully felt and expressed by the French than by 4 any other people. The sumptuous phrases which it suggested to the | i i author of the Lettre à Fontanes are known to everyone. , 11 ‘ A mist such as is to be seen nowhere else veils all distances, round- ing and softening every violence and every hardness of Î : lf ©, colour or shape. The shadows are never heavy and black; | : | | WA no mass, however dense, of rocks or foliage but is penetrated . : I} = by some ray of light. Earth, sky, and water are married i i | in a single, harmonious tint; all surfaces are linked, at their 4 }' extremities, to their neighbours by so imperceptible a VI] | de CAT Np lane renner Hippodrome of the Villa Borghese. THE GARDENS OF ROME 33 Dome of St. Peter, seen from the Pincio. gradation of colours that it is impossible to determine where one shade finishes and another begins. ’’ And André Gide, taking up the tale, has spoken of the incomparable brilliance of that light, on a day when he, too, sat in these same gardens of the Pincio. ‘I could not see the sun; but the air shone, the light was everywhere, as if the azure of the sky had become liquid and was pouring down like rain. Yes! light came in waves, in eddies; light sparkled on the moss like dropsof water; light filled all that great alley like a river, tipping all the branches with golden foam, so that they seemed to trail in a stream of beams. ”’ Happy boarders at Villa Medicis, whose great and beautiful gardens are only a kind of continuation of the Pincio! But there is no need for me to insist on the charms of a visit to this place. There is probably not a single Frenchman of artistic or literary temperament who has journeyed to Rome without visiting this corner of France on Italian soil. The en- trance to the villa has a setting unsurpassed, perhaps, in the world for dignity and loveliness, with those evergreen oaks that stand just before À 34 THE GARDENS OF ROME it and cast their shade over the famous basin, so often reproduced by painters of all countries. Nothing can equal the splendour of late afternoon on the high plateau of those terraces of the Pincio. It is only from a height, for that matter, that cities can be really understood and admired. The most perfect visions Villa Pamphili. of the cities of Italy are to be had from the heights overhanging them. It might be said that, so viewed, the city welcomes the occasion to set itself in order for our pleasure, and utters all its notes at once, as if bent on striking a decisive chord. Seen from here, Rome leaves an inefface- able impression on the mind. The labyrinth of streets and squares, a labyrinth, as it seemed, without a clue, the entanglement of roofs, churches, and palaces, is all smoothed out, renders up its secret, and becomes simple and familiar. With every feature distinct and harmonious in one small compass, the city is like a beautiful face that one might take in one’s two hands, and lift — exemplar of all beautiful faces! — to one’s lips. THE GARDENS OF ROME 35 The dying sun turns bricks to flaming scarlet and sparkles on the glass of churches. Streaks of living purple float in the air. The houses and the Piazza del Popolo curving at my feet are bathed in a shimmer of rosy light. Campanile and trees swim in a wash of reddish vapour. It is an evening landscape by Poussin, full of nobility and gravity, a kind of fairy Avenue in the Villa Albani. transformation scene, the apotheosis of the city in the glory of the dying light. The bells of the churches begin, first one and then another and then all together, peal after peal, the vibrations clashing, mixing, and melting into one continuous hum which hangs above the city like a roof of sound. Many a time, seated on a bench in the garden, I have watched the light fade and the shadows creep little by little up the beautiful smooth Spanish Steps, and over the fine balustrade which runs up from the Piazza q t £ È L. Ë } 36 THE GARDENS OF ROME del Popolo to the topmost terrace of the Pincio. An impalpable fog, growing thicker every minute, flows over the roofs, drowning all details. The great public edifices, the churches, St. Peter’s dome, the squares, the dim line of the quays of the Tiber, the Castle of St. Angelo, the imposing mass of the Palazzo di Guistizia, still show distinctly for a moment. Obscurity, rather than elevation, is the great simplifier. Only the essential things remain. In that moment we can make no mistake : we have seen something final, something which shall endure, because it has been received into our innermost being, and apprehended, in that solemn hour which precedes nightfall, by all our faculties, by mind and heart alike. Tomb of Caecilia Metelia. ae 4 : ON THE PINCIO ri Villa Albani. CHAPTER FIVE RENAISSANCE VILLAS AT ROME Tandis que le couchant fait flamber sa fournaise, Qui s’éteindra bientôt au fond du ciel pâli, Voir se dorer là-bas, tes pins, villa Borghèse Ou s’empourprer les tiens, O villa Pamphili | ouis LE CARDONNEL has brought together in this quatrain the two most beautiful villas that have come down to us from the Roman Renaissance. The great number of these villas made, in former days, an incomparable frame of living green for the city. Many of them disappeared in the course of last century. At the end of Promenades dans Rome, Stendhal, while regretting he cannot write a third volume about — ee ee ES . C—O 38 THE GARDENS OF ROME them, is able to name fifteen among those that have “ given him the greatest pleasure. ’ But alas! here as everywhere, and here perhaps more than elsewhere, has raged that pestilence, once known as “ gress ” or “ civilisation ’”’, which under the new name of “ townplanning ” has taken to-day a more definite and aggravated shape. Several villas have been mutilated or even destroyed in the interests of the highway pro- commissioners. Villa Borghese has suffered least : but even it has lost part of its charm since it was changed into a public garden, above all since it has been connected with the Pincio by a large and lofty stone bridge. It is no longer a villa, but a museum in the middle of a park. The Doria-Pamphili, on the Janiculum at the other end of Rome, built with a workmanlike regard for the undulations of the ground, has kept its character better. To be driven there, on a bright May morning, when the meadows are covered with anemones and cyclamens, is to enjoy the full intoxication of the Roman Spring. Wandering in those beautiful alleys, the visitor is greeted by every species of plant especially Fountain in the Villa Borghese. THE GARDENS OF ROME 39 Villa Doria-Pamphili. characteristic of the Roman villas : enormous ever-green oaks, boxwood, cypresses, heavily-branched plane-trees, eucalyptus growing near foun- tains, and, above all, groves of those magnificent pines, which cast a shade even softer than that of chestnut trees. The light filters through the overarching aerial meadow formed by their linked parasols, a softly tempered light, which is neither shadow nor sunshine, and is unspeakably comforting to the eyes. The Villa Albani, in the neighbourhood of the Villa Borghese, is of more recent date, being hardly later than the second half of the eigh- teenth century. It belongs to-day to the Torlonia family, who are reluctant to admit visitors to it. Its gardens for that matter, are not particularly interesting; but it contains works of art well worth a visit. Taine asserted that this villa taught him, better than any other, the true nature of Italian nobility : in any case, he made it the occasion of a very effective analysis of that tendency to arrange and impose rules on nature, of which I shall have to speak later on. “ Nature is allowed no liberty; everything is factitious. Water must gush forth in jets and in plumes, and 5 À | | IS 5 5 ) what this famous campagna is like? cries President De Brosses. ‘“ Tt is a prodigious and continuous number of little hills of the most barren, wild, uninhabited, melancholy, and horrible kind. Romulus must have been drunk to think of building a city on such an ugly spot. ” 44 THE GARDENS OF ROME Two Frenchmen were the first to feel the grandeur and the poetry of this scenery. Nicolas Poussin found here the ideal frame for his landscapes, Chateaubriand for his rêveries. The campagna and the ruins of Rome, made, as we know, marvellous themes for the author of René, who is, as Jules Lemaitre has called him, le plus grand trouveur Tomb of Caecilia Metella. d'images de la littérature française. Their fallen splendour and desolation were perfectly adapted to his inexhaustible melancholy. It is forever # impossible to call to memory the wide spaces of the agro romano without seeing, leaning against a broken column, the cloaked figure of Cha- teaubriand, with flying locks, as in Girodet’s portrait. Everyone } 4 fe l | knows the magnificent Lettre à Fontanes, of which Sainte Beuve has Es affirmed that it touches high-water mark in the writing of prose : I shall not, therefore, reproduce the famous pages. But Chateaubriand returned to this theme again and again, and notably in the famous meditation when, on his return from Prague, he dreams under the stars and addresses an imaginary Cynthia in some of the most beautiful phrases that have ever fallen from a French pen. ‘ How wonderful is the night, here in the Roman campagna ! The moon rises from behind the Sabine range to look at the sea; Wagons drawn by oxen in the Roman Campagna. GARDENS OF THE VILLA BORGHESE D NE a és nd” THE GARDENS OF ROME 45 she scatters the trans- parent shadows from the ashy blue summits of Albano, and from the more distant and less clearcut line of Soracte... Listen ! The nymph Egeria sings by her fountain; the nightingale begins to be heard in the vine of the hyp GES of ei pyramid. the Scipios; a languid wind from Syria lazily blows in our faces a scent of wild tuberose. ” It is a highly thrilling experience to follow the Appian Way, with its alignment of tombs whose flags have not stirred since they echoed to the tramp of the legionaires. Fragments of aqueducts are studded here and there, and when the shades and mists of evening begin to cover the plain, the whole scene takes an expression almost of tragedy. At some nine odd miles distance on this road lie the lakes of Albano and Nemi, two stern visaged basins of water, each in a crater whose sides are almost bare of vegetation. The lake of Nemi, “ unruffled by a single breeze ” is the more impressive, and one can understand how its wild appearance pleased the sadic madness of Caligula. Deep, lava-co- loured, and motionless ever under the wind, it looks at times like a mass of mercury or of liquid lead. Is this the origin of its name of “ Dia- na’s Mirror ’’? Or did not the name come rather from the great temple which has been discovered in its Wine car “ Castelli romani”’. neighbourhood ? Here the een Er Len EC coe 46 THE GARDENS OF ROME two lovers of the Tvionfo della Morte sat and leaned over that sinister mirror, “ as cold, as impenetrable to the eye as the sky-blue glacier ”’, in whose depths of misty green they read the end of their love and saw reflected their two stricken faces. But we must linger no longer on those shores, where we have already stayed too long. Frascati and Tivoli beckon to us from their hillsides which we can see from here, all rosy in the last rays of the setting sun. A little wind blows from the north-east by way of their flowering gardens, and reaches us laden with perfumes. oe Her Remains of an Aqueduct in the Roman Campagna. The Roman Campagna. CHAPTER SEVEN THE ESTATES OF CICERO, PROPERTIUS AND HORACE HE Romans were tempted, in the beginning, to make the Alban mountains their favourite summer resort. Undeterred either by the volcanic soil or the threat of earthquakes, they were glad, in the terrible and unhealthy heat of the dog-days, to flee from the town to the ~ shadow of those hills. It may be, also, that the stories connecting this district with the fabulous beginnings of their history counted for some- thing in their choice. They liked to recall the old legends of Alba while they quaffed cups of the wine grown on the hills about them, a wine to which lava and cinders have given, as it were, a tang of burnt earth. Of all the Roman villas that must have covered those hills, only licens , SES ET D SVG NE RES re == 7 SG ns 48 THE GARDENS OF ROME Ruins = Cicero’s Villa es Tusculum. the Site of that of Cicero, at Tusculum, above the modern Frascati, is known with certainty. Unfortunately, hardly anything remains of it, or, at most, only some foundations and fragments of walls. It had once belonged to Sulla, and had been bought by The Appian Way. THE GARDENS OF ROME 49 Cicero at the beginning of his political career, being subsequently enlarged and embellished as his fortunes improved. He had commissioned his friend Atticus to send him from Greece — regardless of expense — the most valuable marbles and bronzes procurable. He personally supervised the arrangement of the gardens; we know that they were sheltered from sun and rain by an alley of trees and were surrounded by magnificent meadows. The Sabine mountains a branch of the central Apennines, were the next to attract the Romans. Tibur, on the site of the modern Tivoli, RE Je" 5638 Road beside the Lago di Albano. rapidly to prosperity under the patronage of Maecenas. For the group of epicureans surrounding the favourite of Augustus no spot could have been more delightful. Sufficiently well protected from the winds both of north and south, with a western exposure, and in the direct path of the sea-breeze, lying among magnificent olives and abundant springs and cascades, and a few miles distant from Rome, it united in itself all that the most refined taste could desire. It became the favourite holiday resort of poets, writers, and artists. That ... L’Anio murmure encore Le doux nom de Cynthie aux rochers de Tibur § § 5 È ' | 50 THE GARDENS OF ROME is not a mere flight of poetic fancy : the mistress of Propertius died and was buried in the villa possessed by the poet on the banks of the Anio. Horace, too, although he did not possess a country house here, sang the praises of Tibur, where were numerous friends and colleagues of his, not to speak of Maecenas; and he never failed to make a stay with these friends on his journeys between Rome and Vicovaro, a little east of Tibur, where he had a property. The approximate site of this estate was settled a long while ago by the Abbé Capmartin de Chaupy, a pas- sionate admirer, whose boast it was that everything is to be found in the works of the Latin poet, including a prophesy of the French Revo- lution. A little before the war, if I remember rightly, I read in an Italian paper that, thanks to excavations, the situation of the famous villa has now been finally determined. I doubt if the digging up of a few old walls can make us better acquainted with it than can the numerous passages of his works in which it is so lovingly mentioned by the poet. Lago di Nemi, The Appian Way seen from San Sebastiano. CHAPTER EIGHT L HADRIAN’S VILLA F the remains of country-houses and gardens of ancient Rome that have survived the centuries, the most singular and imposing are those at the gates of Tivoli, of the Villa of Hadrian, that dilletante, literary, and artistic emperor, who was, in some sort, the first tourist. During the first twenty-one years of his reign, he lived very little at Rome, wandering over nearly all his huge empire, and leaving, when he was about sixty, the reins of government to an adopted son. Weary at last of journeying to and fro upon the earth, he withdrew to his estate of Tibur, of which the care and pride engrossed him for the remainder of his life. It had a charm- ing situation, at the foot of the hill on which the town stood, between the valleys through which two streams flow to empty themselves into the Anio. The imagination is overwhelmed before these ruins, deducing, almost with the certainty of vision, the whole from the part, the enormous extent of what must have been from the fragments that remain. Nowhere, except perhaps in the Colosseum, is there more striking witness to the might of Rome and the creative force of an emperor’s will. Hadrian intended not only to build the most sumptuous of country- ee ET 75 a D D a a Re ee 52 THE GARDENS OF ROME houses; he meant each of his buildings to remind him of one of his journeys. I am quite of M. Gaston Boissier’s opinion that it will not do to exaggerate the value of the text of his biographer, Spartianus, who is responsible for this piece of information. But it must have a basis of truth : and it is, besides, the only possible explanation of the multiplicity of palaces, each ~ The Poecile in Hadrian's Villa. : with a famous name: Lyceum, Academy, Prytaneum, Canopus, Peecile, etc. Of all those marvels, we can form only a very dim idea to-day, except of the Pœæcile, whose high brick wall, some two hundred and fifty yards in length, still stands almost complete. On the two sides of this wall, were columns of which only the bases remain; these supported the roofs of a double portico running round the wall, so that when the sun beat on one gallery, the other should be in the shade. In like manner, with a little imagination, we can reconstruct the Serapeon of Canopus, designed to rm = TIVOËI — IN THE GARDENS OF THE VILLA ADRIANA AAC SLA A0 THE GARDENS OF ROME 53 tat Herd of oxen in the Roman Campagna. remind the emperor of the Egyptian voyage. Canopus was the name of the pleasure city of ancient Egypt; a canal, furrowed continually by elegant barges, united it to Alexandria; and in imitation of this, Hadrian had constructed a large ornamental water, on the banks of which stood a row of buildings, fitted up to serve his pleasures : and the old emperor, as we know, disdained no form of pleasure. But I give up the attempt to reconstruct, from its remains, Hadrian’s Hadrian’s Villa : the Greek Theatre. Qc Aire 29 5 . mr 54 THE GARDENS OF ROME villa as it must have been in the days of its splendour. Numerous volumes have been written on this subject by enthusiastic archaeologists. Having the disadvantage — or the good luck — not to be an enthusiastic archaeologist, I am content to enjoy the poetry of ruins and the charm of gardens that have sprung up everywhere about them, gradually covering an area larger than many a town and crowded with works of art that have Hadrian’s Villa : Ruins of the Canopus. gone to enrich most of the museums of Europe, notably those of the Capitol and of the Vatican. When I first visited Rome, I used to haunt the dark groves of the Vale of Tempe, in the little depression separating the villa from the hill of Tivoli, and have passed many a happy hour dreaming there among the olive-trees, which in many places stand as thickly as a wood. Yews, cypresses, and parasol pines grow at hap-hazard; and chance, in this instance, has been more successful than the hand of man, these trees, if left to themselves, seldom failing to make a picture of a landscape. Aged fig-trees clamber on the walls : the latest offspring, perhaps, of a seed planted under the Roman empire. THE GARDENS OF ROME 55) The lonely and forsaken state of the Villa lend it an additional attractiveness. Here again, Chateaubriand was the first to feel it and give magnificent expression to the charm of the place. Overtaken by rain while on a visit to the ruins, he took refuge under a tree, whose growth had dislodged a piece of the wall. ‘ In a little octogonal chamber, a Virginia creeper had pierced the roof of the building; red and twisted, its Hadrian's Villa : Ruins of the Nymphaeum. smooth stout trunk wound up along the wall like a serpent. On all sides of me, through the overarching ruins, I had glimpses of the Roman cam- pagna. In empty halls, the hiding places of a few blackbirds, the elder bushes grew abundantly. Leaves of hartstongue, of a velvety-green, were sprinkled over the fragments of masonry, making a design like mosaic- work against the white marble. Here and there high cypresses usurped the places of the fallen columns in this palace of death, with their feet in wreckage over which the wild acanthus crawled, as if Nature took pleasure in decking the mutilated masterpieces of architecture in the ornament, of their past beauty. The several rooms looked like so many oil ms ñ SA: Sani igo: 56 THE GARDENS OF ROME flower-beds; flowers and grasses nodded like nosegays from the tops of ruined walls; and the wind rustled among the moist garlands, and all the plants bowed down under the pouring skies. ”’ Before leaving the villa, René filled his pockets with fragments of porphyry, alabaster, and verd antique, and pieces of painted stucco and mosaic. These he subsequently threw away, improving the occasion to make a few fine phrases in the vanity of things. And, as if in self-mockery — for what, after all, had he sought for all his life if it was not to link his name to the great events of his day and the famous localities of the past? — he laughs at the visitors who write their names on the marbles of the villa. “ As I was in the act of reading one of these names, a name which had been newly scribbled and seemed familiar, a bird flew out of a tuit of moss, spilling a drop or two of recent rain; the name was blotted out. ” In Hadrian’s Villa. ee Frascati : The Great Cascade of Villa Aldobrandini. CHAPTER NINE CHARACTERISTICS OF ITALIAN RENAISSANCE GARDENS FTER a slumber of several centuries, the hills of Tivoli and Frascati woke up to a new splendour in the years of the Renaissance. As early as 1495, the young King Charles VIII wrote to the Duc de Bourbon : ‘‘ You wouldn’t believe the fine gardens I have seen. Upon my word, there’s only Adam and Eve wanting, to make them an earthly paradise. ” A century later, Montaigne went into raptures over the cas- cades of Tivoli and the fountains in the gardens of the Cardinal of Ferrara, that is to say, of the Villa d’Este. France and Italy, for that matter, have always been in friendly relations, and never more so than at the Renaissance. A sojourn in Rome was then, more than it is to-day, the indispensable complement of a good 8 —E—————— ‘ . £ x = ge 58 THE GARDENS OF ROME + SR Aldobrandini. À # Frascati : Fountain in the Villa education; and men came to sharpen their wits as much as to improve their scholarship. Montaigne recommends the voyage to Italy not in order to know ‘ how many paces there are from one end to another of such and such a church, but for the sake of rubbing and sharpening one’s brains against other people’s ”. I am very fond, I confess, of reading the works of the tourists of old time. I like them — apart from the documentary interest belonging to a knowledge of the modifications contributed by successive civilizations — because they reveal our ancestors to us in their manner of feeling, and above all because they are the most delightful of travelling-companions. Neither our jeers nor our querulous humours can put them out of temper. When in their pages, we come across something which has struck them as it might have struck us, we feel so lively a satis- faction that they seem to share with us the pleasure of that encounter. When, on the other hand, we find them utterly strange to our ideas and our tastes, what a subtle amusement we get out of that! Nothing is so odd as the discovery of the fact that, given a difference of a mere three THE GARDENS OF ROME 59 centuries, tastes in matters of art may have absolutely nothing in common. Among those travellers of other days, the nearest to us — not only in point of time, but by reason of his way of feeling, of understanding, and of observing — is President De Brosses, whose testimony is indispens- able when information is sought of the state of the places we are visiting in the middle of the eighteenth century. He has left, among other sketches, numerous descriptions of these gardens. Here is a page which deserves to be reproduced in this place, first of all because it countains the judgment of a Frenchman of taste, in full eighteenth century, and secondly because it shows the state in which those villas, both of the town and of the Roma campagna, were at that time. “ We need not expect to find here gardens like those of the Tuileries, nor even gardens laid out with the taste of the one in the Palais Royal. We Frenchmen have far surpassed the Italians in the art of laying out Frascati : Villa Mondragone : Cypress Avenue. em pee oe RE ap DIOR 60 THE GARDENS OF ROME gardens, an art which we got from them..... After all, the Italians follow their taste and the nature of their climate; they like evergreens, grass rather than sand in the alleys, long narrow avenues with high palings, capable of affording protection from the sun of a hot country. They must have an abundance of fountains, big or little; a population of statues, Frascati : Cypress of the Villa Falconieri. termini, bas-reliefs, obelisques. In this respect they have, much more than we, the wherewithal to satisfy themselves; and the statuary in their gardens is a great adornment, which is frequently absent from ours. They seem to care almost nothing for trimness or neatness, and cannot spend much on gardeners. In this, no doubt, they think to preserve the uncul- tivated and rustic look of their gardens; it would be rude to put it down to mere niggardliness..... As far as irregular gardens go, they have none to equal Saint-Cloud for rural charm, nor Marly for picturesqueness and ” pleasantness. IS FRASCATI — CASCADE IN THE VILLA ALDOBRANDINI IAIGMAHAOGTAÀ RTL V4 V HHT Ul HAADÈA) - = ITAD@AA HL +: I THE GARDENS OF ROME lope Frascati : Villa Aldobrandini. I have no mind to open here a debate on the respective merits of French and Italian gardens. As President De Brosses remarked, they are the opposite of each other for several reasons, the chief of which is climate. We can be content simply to enjoy those Roman villas, and that charm of theirs, which artists and writers, especially, find so attractive to-day,and whose different elements I think I have indicated. This charm comes, in the first place, from their very age, their fame, and their forlornness. At Rome, more than anywhere else in the world, every landscape has a history. Walking in those alleys, which date, as they stand, from the Renaissance, we can tell ourselves that they perhaps cover sites laid down by the owners of those villas of imperial Rome, some of whose proud remains we have visited. What Latin heart but must swell to think that this soil was trodden by Cicero and Maecenas, Augustus and Horace, Virgil and Propertius, and that here, under those same skies, the sweetness of life was mingled for those great men with the taste of the Falernian and the music of verses? Our feelings — I have said it already, in speaking of the Forum and the Palatine — are always touched by ruins. René Boylesve has very properly pointed out with regard to those very gardens of Italy that our fondness for their age and their melancholy is the product of Sai nets == = mes = a SS us — ” , : = = — = | 62 THE GARDENS OF ROME © Frascati : Balustrade in the Villa Torlonia. time, that it is ‘‘time,and centuries of sun and rain, that have given them that weather-beaten complexion we admire, loaded them with ennobling memories, peopled them with ghosts, and, in short, made them touching in their splendid dilapidation ”’. These Renaissance gardens recall the most brilliant of civilizations, a time of aristocracy and elegance, attractive in its very contrast to our vulgar and mediocre day. Our imagination is easily kindled by the traces of a luxurious past. We are on fire for beautiful princesses, forsaken for two centuries. An old broken column, covered with weeds, a moss-eaten marble torso, a balustrade half-hidden under ivy and virginia creeper, stir the heart as nothing else can. The trees for whose shade we are grateful to-day have grown majestic with the years. Everything in these villas has taken on a more touching beauty, the beauty that sometimes comes to the works of man from the triple collaboration of art, nature, and time. Moreover, in contrast to what we see at home, these gardens are not content to be mere arrangements of flowers and foliage : they are works of art, in which architecture and statuary play an essential part. Unlike English and French gardeners, the Italians make no attempt at an artific- 63 ial imitation or a harmonious arrangement of nature ; their intention is to heighten her beauty by making her a partner in their emotions. We are far from Ronsard crying : J'aime fort les jardins qui sentent le [sauvage ! Everything, as Taine remarked when he visited the Villa Albani, speaks of the civilization and refinement of man, and of man’s determination to make nature an accomplice of his whim and the servant of his pleasures. Nowhere can this conquering Tivoli. — Steeple of San Francesco will be more plainly seen than seen from the Villa d’Este. here, in those Roman villas, whose magnificence contrasts so violently with the barrenness of the soil on which they stand. Amaz- ing is the only word to describe the boldness and in genuity that must have gone to the act of creative force that called those T'vascatt sight from the Villa Torlonia. —_ _— a oe A i 25. gardens into being on one of the poorest country-sides in the world. Their creators have in very truth imposed their discipline upon nature, but with the consummate skill of the greatest artists the world has ever seen. A visitor to these gar- dens soon perceives that they have certain resem- blances in common which may be summed up in three Frascati : Entrance to the Villa Falconieri. elements : evergreens, marbles, and fountains. of our French parks. The high boxwood, The foliage of boxwood, pines, evergreen oaks and cypresses is almost the only green to be seen; whence that appearance of immutability worn all the year round by those gardens; a contrast to the fickle faces Frascati : Gardens of the Villa Falconieri. THE GARDENS OF ROME 65 whose bitter and yet sweet smell is so strong in early Spring, is parti- cularly adapted, when skilfully pruned, to geometrical figures and archi- tectural lines : its dark foliage makes excellent background for the whiteness of marble. The parasol pines of the Roman campagna have a nobility of aspect in harmony with the austere monotony of the lands- Camaldoli seen from Tusculum. cape. The only note of freshness and rustic charm in the rather stiff- looking scenery comes from the evergreen oaks. But it is to the cypresses, Les hauts, les purs cyprès sereinement funèbres, sung by Le Cardonnel, that we must look for the essential characteristic of these gardens. It is impossible to enter without a tremor those lofty alleys in which mystery dwells. Indeed, it is impossible to look at those trees without a feeling, almost, of fear. Dark as night, haughty, severe, impervious to the light and even to the wind, which bends them without disturbing their leaves, careless of the weather, stiffly erect and com- pletely indifferent to their surroundings, they are absorbed in their decor- SF eS ll ae SS ee THE GARDENS OF ROME 66 sp Fyascati : Fountain in the Villa Mondragone. ative function. They are content to live solitary and barren. We admire, | : j t ; but cannot love them. ‘‘ This tree ’’ writes René Boylesve “ is sufficient to preserve a landscape from the insipidity that might come of a too great profusion of attractions; there it stands, like the uplifted finger of the Stoic philosophy, reminding men that the laughter of fountains and the games of children are not everything, that there is an element of gravity in the world ”. Marble, in these gardens, plays almost as important a part as the foliage of trees. Staircases, terraces, vases, statues, porticos, balustrades, are everywhere displayed, and always with a careful and studied arrange- ment of effects, as in the scenery of a theatre. Everything is so disposed as to be, as has been said, either a “ point of view” or a “ sight in itself” and as often as not, both together. Whatever their proportions or position with regard to the palace, these gardens are always designed as integral parts of the building, which finds its continuation and com- pletion in them. Nothing can be more decorative than fine staircases, whether we stand below and watch them slowly climbing upwards and Ed SS ne ee THE GARDENS OF ROME 67 calling our dreaming fancies up with them, or whether we admire from above their smooth and slippery steps falling away from us, in a majes- tic cascade. Moreover, almost all Italian villas are built upwards on the hill sides, in terrace after terrace. The parks of the Isle of France or of Touraine, on the contrary, are spread over wide, and either quite flat, Frascati : Villa Falconieri : Gate of the Lions. or only slightly undulating, spaces; they have majestic lines, harmonious features, but they are cold, too, and austere, like the measured periods of Racine or Bossuet. In Italy the gardens wear the tormented look we see in the portraits of their creators, and unless we have imagination to divine the soul under its trappings, we shall miss the charm. The vistas of Ver- sailles are best admired in calm and solitude. An Italian garden, with its sudden corners, its alternating heat and shade, its profusion of ready AR REE a ae nr = = M RE 68 THE GARDENS OF ROME Frascati : Balustrade in the Villa Torlonia. F t | i i 5 perfumes, is like a stage set for passionate drama. How well the labyrinth of the park of Stra suits the cruel ingenuity of Gabrielle d’Annunzio’s hero, Stelio Effrena, who seems own brother to the spirit of the place ! Ornamental waters complete the decoration of these villas. The Renaissance architects tried all sorts of combina- tions in this kind : imita- tion springs, jets of a single powerful stream, jets in bouquets, cascades, basins one above another, basins succeeding each other, hy- draulic power and statuary combined : but they never attempted the spacious general effects attained at Frascati : Villa Aldobrandini. Frascati — FOUNTAIN OF PAUL V IN THE VILLA MONDRAGONE Sa SS SS es Sees ee Sse ST A IPA2A HH Y4 T J S 2 © fe a ee EN ET 1 pr De ete toner Te Sn Me UT, THE GARDENS OF ROME 69 Frascati : Villa Piccolomini. Versailles. Italian art is less sober than French: the part is rarely sacrificed to the whole. Montaigne, in his day, remarked the odd inventiveness of the artists who contrived the fountains in these gardens; he mentions with admiration a group of wrestlers in bronze, weg “ one of whom is about to swoon; his head is thrown back; the water gushes from his mouth as if squeezed out of him ”. But here again it is President De Brosses who should be quoted, if one passage in his letter were not rather too lively. The good Bur- gundian and his fellow- Wagon of the Roman Campagna. travellers took a school- PAR ee — SIRE EES NT ve En nes 70 THE GARDENS OF ROME boy’s pleasure in these ornamental waters, some of which are cleverly arranged so as to deluge unwary visitors. They have to go several times to the inn at Frascati for a change of linen, and they finish the evening “ naked, but for our dressing-gowns, eating a very poor supper, with our shirts and breeches drying at the fire ”. Now that life has ebbed away from most of these villas, all this splendour of verdure, marble, and fountains makes but a melancholy show. Even so, our admiration is increased rather than lessened: If, above all, we are Frenchmen, we cannot but feel the strange fascination of these gardens. Frascati : Terrace of the Villa Mondragone. Frascati : Cypresses of the Villa Falconieri. CHAPTER TEN THE VILLA OF FRASCATI HE modern Frascati was built among the brushwood (frasche) from ai which comes its name, a little below Tusculum, which was destroyed in the Middle Ages and whose ruins still remain on the edge of a pine- wood. Standing to-day among its olives and vines, with a view over the swelling Latin plain — green or russet, according to the season — the situation of the villa is one of the finest in the world. Its endless terraces reach out into the vast expanse like capes. To the left can be seen the village of Rocca di Papa, built in the form of an amphitheatre, on a hillock at the foot of Mount Cavo; to the right appear the first heights of Tivoli; in front stretches the endless length of the campagna, with its SAR: pres res rt 72 THE GARDENS OF ROME aqueducts and the city’s mass of roofs, looking from here as if heaped up round the dome of St-Peter’s; while in the far background are the Mediterranean beaches, where the fiery globe of the sun goes down every evening. With the Renaissance, the cardinals saw how much could be made of this mar- vellous site : and then began the building of those numer- ous villas to which every tourist pays his respects = De He Rome AS à A View of Tivoli from Ponte Gregoriano. matter of fact the tourist seldom sees more than one or two of those villas, either from want of time, or because, as is often the case, certain gates are shut against him. i The most imposing, and the first to be seen on approaching the town, is the Villa Aldobrandini. The entrance to this | 4 villa is of truly monumental dignity, with + f Frascati seen from Villa Mondragone. THE GARDENS OF ROME 73 Frascati : Villa Aldobrandini seen from the public Gardens. its high pilasters and its walls on which stand a number of highly decorative vases. Clement VIII, whose arms are displayed on the roof of the great gallery, gave the site to Pietro Aldobrandini, who was cardinal at twenty two years of age. The buildings were constructed on plans drawn up by Giacomo della Porta. Considerable labour was expended on the tapping of a number of springs, whose waters come down in foaming cascades to the ‘“ water-theatre’’, an elegant structure with a statue of Atlas bearing the world on his back in the middle. Nowhere is there a more ingenious arrangement of hydraulic toys; it was here that President De Brosses and his friends found so much amusement. Fountains of the oddest shapes adorn the alleys and groves; one of these fountains is made in the form of a tiny ship, elegantly carved out of stone. The house is quiet and solemn-looking, and suggests, as Paul Hazard has said, the garden of the Sleeping Beauty; a kind of contemplative calm reigns under the cypresses 74. THE GARDENS OF ROME and pines. As the visitor roams these alleys and terraces his eye is greeted, at every step, by pictures framed between columns, between vases, and even between trunks of trees. Here Goethe, in 1787, spent enthusiastic days. “ I am very happy here ”’ he writes. ‘‘ All my time is taken up with drawing, painting, etc.’ One of those drawings of the { a È ra à Mr CR Frascati : Corner in the Park of Villa Torlonia. Roman campagna seen from Frascati is preserved at Weimar showing in the background the dark outline of the city which was to have so profound, so decisive, an influence on his mind and art. A few years ago Villa Aldobrandini was acquired by foreigners who, it is said, intended to transform it into an international ‘‘ palace ’’. Hap- pily, the Department of Fine Arts intervened to prevent this profanation and succeeded in having the Villa declared a national monument, a classification corresponding to our monuments historiques. On this magni- THE GARDENS OF ROME 75 ficent belvedere, overlooking the most famous prospect in the world, no jazz-band will ever be installed. The Villa Torlonia stands on the site of the seat possessed by Lucullus at Tibur. It was here that Annibal Caro built the modern Villa and trans- lated the Aineid, a fact recalled in a pompous inscription. Passing from Frascati : Villa Mondragone seen from the Park of Villa Falconieri. family to family in the course of successive centuries, the estate devolved finally on the Torlonia, who possess it to-day. Here again are to be seen a luxurious park, imposing fountains, flowering gardens, vast terraces, designed by Maderno, is less formal than the one at Villa Aldobrandini, but more elegant. a” splendid staircases. The ‘ water-theatre A delightful corner is the terrace of the Candeliere (a lofty candlestick in sculptured stone, from which the water gushes), where a fine view can be had of Frascati and its neighbourhood. ee Pe a tn som 2 a Tree» È | TNS ne mm Are a 76 THE GARDENS OF ROME At the top of the town and to the left of the Aldo- brandini a visit should be paid — if one is lucky enough to obtain entrance to it — to the Villa Lancellotti, whose shy charm makes itself felt at once. I have a great liking for its pret- tily laid-out flower- Frascati : Cascade in Villa Torlonia. bed, as well as for its nymphaeum, lorded-over by a fine marble Apollo. “ The oldest and simplest of the villas of Frascati” in the words of a certain inscription, is the Falconieri, which was the creation of Cardinal Ruffini. It is my favourite, neither for its doorways, its fountains, its frescos, nor its works of art, but for its deep and solitary gardens, where a dreamer can contemplate in silence and peace the noble prospects opening 3, all round him. Nothing could be more affecting than Frascati : Fountain in Villa Piccolomini. the little lake which mirrors the splendid cypresses. Before the war, this estate fell into the hands of a German finan- cier, who was said to be neither more nor less than an intermediary of William II. Saverio Kambo, in the fine book which he wrote the other day ER EE mn STE FRASCATI —: TERRACES OF THE VILEA TORLONIA i { | TA ALY DE ee THE GARDENS OF ROME Wah on Frascati, com- | plains that two or | three years ago he was unable to visit, | without the per- | mission of the Swiss embassy, this “most Italian of the villas i} of Frascati’’, as he | very properly calls | it. The Italian Gov- ernment would be well-inspired to put ; this villa at the disposal of Gabriele d’Annunzio. It could shelter no one more worthy of it. No residence is more worthy of the poet of the Elegie Romaine, Frascati : Villa Aldobrandini : the Upper Cascade. the poet who, better than anyone, has felt and expressed the pride and the languor of those Renaissance Villas, in whose gardens I can well imagine him making one of a group that should include IL Magnifico, Tasso, and Ippolito d’Este. Before leaving Frascati we must visit the Villa Mondragone, which | will reward this last effort on our part. It was founded by Cardinal Marco Sittico d’Altemps, nephew of Pius IV, subsequently pass- ing into the pos- session of Cardinal Scipio Borghese, a charming fellow and a lover of the pomp of power, of whom Bernini made a fine bust, and whom the Romans hailed as the ‘“ de- Frascati : Terrace in the Villa Mondragone. = PR CR 29 Ep a —— THE GARDENS OF ROME 78 lizia di Roma ” from the day he built the Villa Borghese. This was Villa Mondragone’s day of splendour : Scipio’s uncle, Pope Paul V, was one of its frequenters. Everything in it was on a magnificent scale : gardens, works of art, receptions. But alas! with the deaths of Paul V and of his nephew, a rapid decadence set in; and after a thousand vicissitudes, the villa ended its days as a college of Jesuits. One incomparable feature it has retained, or, rather, has developed : its trees. Every species of Frascati : Upper Water-basin in Villa Torlonia. tree that boasts a dense foliage has flourished magnificently : evergreen oaks, parasol pines, and the lofty green or reddish brown cypresses which gleam and ripple in the wind. The pines stand up straight and smooth as columns, in the soft afternoon light, a band of brothers : the breath that shakes one will make them all shudder together. Under the branches of the oaks there is a great stillness : between their trunks you can see the landscape veiled in a blue haze. The crickets shrill their loudest and their cry seems the very utterance of that piercing light. THE GARDENS OF ROME 79 A further charm of this park is that being at a greater distance from the town than the others, it is easier to imagine oneself really in the country, which is not displeasing after long wandering among the somewhat i artificial attractions of those Roman gardens. This no doubt is what fascinated Georges Sand, the action of whose strange novel, La Baniella,is unfolded on the terraces of Frascati. Except- ing the Villa Mondragone, she had no great liking for any of the villas Frascati : Staircase in the Park of Villa Torlonia. | we have just been visiting; but she perceived how large a part of the charm of their gardens comes from their ruins and their age. ‘‘ The Pans Lt. have lost their flutes, the nymphs have lost their noses. And many a merry god is poorer still, a leg on a pedestal being all that remains of him. The defaulting members lie at the bottom of basins. The waters no longer blow through organ-pipes; they still gush from marble conches, but they sing in their natural voices. The rockeries are draped in green locks of their own growing and look more themselves for the change. The trese = a a Oe EN SSS Re 80 THE GARDENS OF ROME have started on a new life in the energetic climate and have become giants, in the full tide of youth and health. The dead ones disturb the symmetry of the alleys; the flower-beds are full of weeds : moss has spread its velvet over the vivid pattern of the mosaics; everything bears the stamp and sign of a world in revolt and cast adrift, everything speaks of ruin and sings of solitude. ’’ It was this song of solitude, the rumour of hills and valleys, the strange harmony made by the bells and creaking weather- cocks of Camaldoli villages, that she had in mind when she attempted the curious musical landscape in which, as I have remarked elsewhere, she seems to have anticipated the evolution of modern music. Frascati : Portion of the Villa Falconieri. CHAPTER ELEVEN THE VILLA D’ESTE, AT TIVOLI UT the pearl, among all these Roman villas, is the Villa d’Este, at Tivoli. Its is no unmerited glory; and every traveller who spends a few days in the Eternal City must include this villa among the things he must see at all costs. Not that a first glimpse of Tivoli holds no disappointment. First comes a climb among olive-trees of fantastic shapes, as fine as anything I know of their kind, to a little town of no particular character save for its celebrated and picturesque cascades. In the maze of little streets it is a matter of some difficulty to find the entrance to the palace : and here disillusions crowd thickly upon the uninitiated traveller, full of NS ae mere Er SS 82 THE GARDENS OF ROME the thought that he is about to see one of the marvels of Italy À mean entrance-hall leads into a mean court-yard, round which runs a poorish colonnade: further on are dismal corridors and more or less empty gal- leries, in which it is difficult to imagine there has ever been any splen- Tivoli : Corner of the Villa d’ Este. dour. This mournful impression is strengthened by the number of decayed paintings on the walls. Finally, a door opens on a terrace; and the eyes are dazzled ! A cry of admiration bursts from all lips, and is repeated ten, twenty, a hundred times a day, by every new visitor. It is just a question whether everything has not been arranged in view of this effect. ae EN —_ THE GARDENS OF ROME 83 A first glance at the gardens at our feet, and then we lift our eyes to the magnificent vistas opening all around us. To the left is Tivoli and | its pile of houses sloping towards the Anio, or rather, towards the Teve- rone, to use the modern name; behind are the hills, and, further on, but Tivoli : Palace and Central Avenue of Villa d’Este. 1 looking quite near, in the transparent air, the clear-cut summit of Soracte. To the left are the Sabine slopes, covered with olive-trees and vines | stretched on high poles; further down, the ruins and groves of Hadrian’s villa; finally, the plain, on which river and road shine like bright ribbons, 14 to be lost at last in the campagna. Peasants driving yokes of white oxen, | with great horns, walk behind ploughs of primitive shape, more or less Se ee nt THE GARDENS OF ROME Panorama of Tivoli. the same, no doubt, as those pulled by the oxen of Evander, when they tilled the soil for Æneas, three thousand years ago. But once more we glance at the gardens, and once more exclaim in astonishment. How shall we describe this magni- ficently ordered confusion, this medley of wildest fantasy and severely disci- plined effort? A studied arrangement is soon apparent in this riot of verdure. Never has what Barrés so happily calls “ the art of arranging reality in such a way as to delight the soul ” been carried further. Never have the three elements which I tried, a moment ago, to distinguish and analyse, been more happily combined. There is not a corner that is not at the same time a ce point ? of view ”” and a “ sight in itself ’; not Tivoli seen from a Terrace of Villa d’Este. TEVOET —FOUNTAIN IN THE VittlA D ESTE ER — a corner where marble does not enhance the neighbouring foliage; not a corner where some ornamental water does not reflect the white tint of marble and the green tint of trees. It is an entrancing symphony, a kind of cantata for three voices, with themes interwoven with consummate art. The murmur of waters makes a delightful accompaniment to dreams as inconstant as themselves : the music of waterfalls is mingled with the rumour of rocking branches and the rustle of leaves. ‘ They speak, the hundred fountains’”’ writes Gabriele 5 mes Countryside at Tivoli. d’Annunzio, in Elegie Romaine, ‘ their voices are heard under the virgin green, voices soft and low as the accents of women, while on their pinnacles, empurpled by the sun, shine, O glory of Este! the eagles and the fleur-de-lys. ”? Olive-trees at Tivoli. noe ae 4 86 THE GARDENS OF ROME In the Garden of Villa d’ Este. But it is vain to try to render in words what is essentially inexpress- ible, to fix harmonies so fluid that they have dissolved in the moment of their birth. Even music is powerless. Liszt made the attempt, but showed himself no match for his model. In one of the note- books of Sainte-Beuve, which I published the other day, there is mention of his visit to the Villa d’Este in the company of the famous composer. The writer too, was strongly moved to make averse in praise of these gardens, to paint what he called Ancient Piazza at Tivoli. THE GARDENS OF ROME 87 ‘“ my Poussin landscape’’. Alas! the poet’s lyre was feebler than the painter’s brush, feebler even than the musician’s piano; and the _ lines, which can be read in his collected poems, are very indifferent. But the highly intelligent, if not very artistic, critic had seen at the first glance that he was looking at a picture by Poussin; and Poussin put more into his work than mere intelligence and conventional arran- ie Tivoli : Temple of the Sibyl. gement. Gaspard Valette, in his Reflets de Rome, emphasises this point, and with reason. Great, noble, and majestic lines; foregrounds of smooth grass or green corn; the slenderness of pines outlined against the sky; the domes of tombs and fragments of crumbling aqueducts : the graceful curves of hills; in the distance a dark stain, the sea, and the bluish profile of mountains; such is the classic landscape of seventeenth century painters, and it is nothing more or less than the Roman lands- cape. Just as in Renaissance frescos there are more portraits and scenery taken from real life than is generally believed, so in the canvasses of Poussin there is more direct vision of nature than has often been noticed. THE GARDENS OF ROME In the Villa d'Este. As surely as Poussin, and perhaps with greater fidelity, Claude Gelée, fresh from his native Lorraine, caught in innumerable drawings and sepias, the noble majesty of the gardens and horizons of Tivoli, After him came Fragonard and Hubert Robert, working at the Villa d’Este, living there four whole months in 1760, and drawing from morning to night. “ These majestic gardens, ” writes Pierre de Nolhac, “ with one or two corrections from nature, enraptured our artists. They never wearied of setting up their easels in the central alley, before those flights of terraces and the lofty cypresses so often reproduced by their pencils. No lack of motives among the moss-eaten staircases, the rockeries and fountains : light and shade conflicted violently over all the landscape; everywhere the eye was Tivoli : Cascae by Bernini. THE GARDENS OF ROME 89 Tivoli : Banks of the Anio. caught by some odd detail; a draped or naked figure in its niche, the bust of an emperor looking out of a grove of flowering laurels. ”’ Since those days artists and writers in crowds have come to dream in the incomparable gardens. Here, among the triple perfumes of flowers, foliage, and fountains, life is an ecstasy. Here the mind reverts to those Armida groves where a hero’s heart was soft- ened by the fragrance of flowers. From dark lanes in whose walls of towering trees the sun’s rays can hardly find a breach, the visitor emerges on blazing terraces and sees the tawny hills unfolding lines as graceful as those of the Tuscan mountains. Dismembered marbles stand among the boxwood. A fine rain rises from the cascades and the light plays over them in wisps Temple of the Sibyl. 90 THE GARDENS OF ROME of unreal gauze. Round the innumerable ornamental waters the air is thick with a kind of floating spray. All the colours of the rainbow are reflected in pools folded in the curves of railings and balustrades. The green, blue, or well-nigh black surfaces of the great basins strike a sober note of their own, supplying, as it were, the continuous bass In the Park of Villa d Este. accompaniment to the passionate song of the fountains. And in every direction the alternate plumes of yew-trees and fountains are brand- ished aloft, vying with each other in audacity. Except perhaps on the terraces of the Giusti garden at Verona, I have never seen finer cypresses. Their old trunks are wasted and cracked; but the wounds have been THE GARDENS OF ROME OT dressed and the holes stopped up. René Schneider has well said that these trees have not the slender spindle shanks which belong to the woods of Tuscany, and which suit so well the delicate Florentine land- scape : they are bushy from the base, almost from the ground-level, and thickly tufted to the very summit. Withal, they have the Roman gravity, ae. oa Cypresses in the Villa d’ Este. and are wonderfully perfect symbols of the haughty melancholy of Latium. My chief regret it not to have had an opportunity of spending an evening in these gardens in June, when the fire-flies, hovering in their thousands among the flowers and foliage, spread a kind of luminous net-work over the grass. It was near here that Anatole France found RE CT QU ee reer 92 THE GARDENS OF ROME pleasure in watching these animated sparks carrying their lanterns to and fro over the tomb of Cæcilia Metella, where they have danced every summer for two thousand years. * * * The Villa d’Este is the most perfect example in the world of the heights to which princely luxury and the pride of life could be carried General View of the Cascades at Tivoli. in the ever-blessed days of the Renaissance. No residence could have been better fitted for that most lordly of great lords, Cardinal Ippolito, the son of Lucrezia Borgia, who was half a Frenchman, and the friend and protector of Clément Marot. In that brilliant court of the Villa d’Este met together all the literary men and all the artists of the period. Life passed gaily at Tivoli, for all the bareness of the surrounding moun- tains, and in spite of the almost empty countryside of those days; and an endless succession of festivals, concerts, and banquets continued the princely splendours of Ferrara. In these gardens, under the funereal yew- trees, walked Tasso, meditating the last lines of his Jerusalem, with a gré mn A UE re re ate us Le pe mt li _ VILLA D'ESTE RE TIVOLI — AVENUE IN TH fé. à THE GARDENS OF ROME 93 The Road to Tivoh. heart full of melancholy and passion. All the guests of the house were so smitten with archaeology, so enthusiastic for antiquity, that they must have everything in the antique style. They even went the length of calling one corner Rometta, little Rome. Pierre de Nolhac, in his delightful Souvenirs d’un Vieux Romain, paints a picture of these gatherings of humanists, on the terraces of the Villa d’Este, on summer evenings, when the talk was all of the Rome of other days. “ A passage of Livy would be brought up for discussion; there would be recitations of sonnets and distichs: and pity would be expressed for the friends who had stayed in the stifling heat of the town. Far away there would be a sparkle on cupolas smit- ten by the sun as it sank towards Ostia : the rays would linger and Hydraulicon in the Villa d’ Este. lighten on the middle of the plain, where was a huge heap of antique walls, half buried under verdure : the ruins of Hadrian’s villa, from which were daily dug up masterpieces, to be wrangled over by Pope and pre- lates.’ And, as a matter of fact, the excavation and pillage of the palaces constructed by the old emperor went hand in hand in those days; forgotten for centuries, these marvels served to embellish the villa of Cardinal Ippo- lito, who, in his quality of nearest neighbour, looked upon himself as in some sort the heir of Hadrian, whose prodigalities and whims he set himself to imitate and repeat. La Rometta, the cave of the Sibyl, and Tivoli : The Great Cascade. THE GARDENS OF ROME 95 other groves with literary names were reconstructions of the antique analogous to those attempted by Hadrian in his palace called Canopus of Egypt and his Vale of Tempe : playthings characteristics of an age of learning, when creative force is exhausted and scholars take precedence of artists and lead them by the hand. And how, it might well be asked, can you avoid the thought of Rome and of her past glories, on this spot? She pursues you in the garden- Staircase and Fountain in the Villa d'Este. walks and among the ruins. She haunted Chateaubriand; witness the magnificent page in that Lettre à Fontanes, which I am forced once more to quote, so thoroughly has it become, as it were, part and parcel of these precincts, or, at least, of our vision of them : “ It would be difficult to find anywhere else in the world a view more astonishing than this and more fertile in the material of weighty reflections. I do not speak of Rome, whose domes are visible from here : Rome, of herself, says everything there is to be said; I speak merely of the places and remains contained in this vast space. Here is the house re OR PRIT PR a = — 96 THE GARDENS OF ROME where Mecenas, satiated with the good things of the earth, died of a decline; Varius left this hill-side to pour out his blood in the marshes of Germany; Cassius and Brutus forsook those retreats to overthrow their country. Under the lofty pines of Frascati, Cicero dictated his Tusculan Disputations : a new Peneus flowed, at Hadrian’s bidding, at the foot of that hill, and the names, the charms, and the memories of the Vale of Tempe were transplated to these precincts. Those mountains are the ancient Sabine hills; these are the plains of antique Latium, the RES a SERIE porte faring apm Tivoli : Bridge over the Anio. i earth of Saturn and of Rhea, cradle of the golden age... ’’ And he goes on to recall the memory of Tasso and of his protector, Cardinal Ferrara, and once more the phrases on the vanity of all things human come to the tip of his pen : ‘‘ Ariosto and Ippolito d’Este have left in the val- if leys of Tivoli a memory as full of charm as that of Horace and Mecenas. \h But where are they now, protectors and protected? Even as I write, the : House of Este is extinguished : the villa of the Cardinal d’Este is a ruin like that of the minister of Augustus. It is the history of all things and ” ETDS SRS Date cit staat th of all men. SS SE a a NE Se M THE GARDENS OF ROME 07 * * * From the day on which Italy entered the war at our side the muni- cipality of Tivoli took possession of the estate which was then the pro- perty of Archduke Francis-Ferdinand; and it is this municipality which now collects the entrance fees. The weather-beaten eagle of Este, which Staircase in the Villa d’ Este. is to be seen sculptured everywhere, seems the symbol of the lamentable adventure which ended in the wreck of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. I am ignorant of the ultimate fate of the Villa. But would it not be well to remember the wish recorded by Henri de Régnier that it should be reserved for poets and men-of-letters? ‘‘ I should like ”’ he wrote, “ to see them with their elbows on the stone balustrade, sniffing the bitter smell that rises from the dark boxwood and green cypresses in the depths below, and listening long and delightedly to the murmur of cascades water-spouts, and fountains, that moist, musical and cool murmur, that, stays forever in the memory of every visitor to this beautiful place ”. Where, for that matter, better than on those terraces, could a young 13 | | Re ee Te 1! 98 THE GARDENS OF ROME 4 writer dream, meditate, compose? Nearly all his elders have come here for inspiration, especially since Chateaubriand revealed the grandeur and the poetry of the Roman campagna. George Sand seems almost alone in her lack of appreciation of the incomparable fascination of this scenery. ‘ Ugly ” she cries, ‘ thrice ugly and stupid, the Roman steppe. Give me my fertile downs of Marche and Bourbonnais! ”’ Could she not see, beyond the wide undulations of the plain that are like waves that have petrified and died by the edge of the living ocean — had she no eyes to see, on the horizon, the high walls of the Colosseum stand up against the sky together with St-Peter’s dome : the outline of the City? There is no grander sight in the world than this neighbourhood of Rome; there, engraved in letters that must endure forever, is displayed the noblest page in the history of man. I am of Stendhal’s way of thinking when he wrote : ‘ There is nothing on earth to compare to this. ” AN The Banks of the Anio. — pomnneits OF Dr TIVOLI -— STAIRCASE IN THE VILLA D'ESTE — Fe i ¢ | j il Œ AXUIV HT AI H8ADAIATE —- HIOVIT » ÿ Frascati seen from a tervace of Villa Falconieri. TABLE OF CONTENTS Pages Chapter I. — The Romans and the Feeling for Nature . . . . . =... : 9 —— Ol, I (Cormolerns oie nro RON OG 13 — III. — In the Ruins of the Forum and the Palatine. . . . . ... . 7, = Vee Oni the) herraces of the: bin Clon ssacemn: oleracea ee ee 31 = Wo = IRarercsmee Willesiae Ione 5 gg oo a Ue ee 37 VIE The Roman Campagna NUE noose aeons mrt Sa ae Oe 43 — VII. — The Estates of Cicero, Propertius, and Horace. . . ...,.. =. 47 ieee i Se PE TP er GS os = Ses a me Te) rs serious taper np aap on ng, SX aoe 100 THE GARDENS OF ROME Chapter VIII. — Hadrian’s Villa. — IX. — Characteristics of Italian Renaissance Gardens . == X. — The Villas of Frascati . — XI. — The Villa d’Este at Tivoli . Fountain in Villa Albani. Pages 5a wpe 8r The photographs reproduced in this work were supplied by the following firms ALINARI, ANDERSON and MoscIontI. 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