The Villa Palmieri and its gardens are somewhat the worse for stress of time; and the wind and the hot sun have burned up the shrubs and trees since the days when Zocchi the draughtsman made that series of formal drawings of Italian gardens, that of the Villa Palmieri among the number, which are so useful to the compilers of books on Italian villas and gardens.
Fiesole sits proudly on its height a thousand feet above the level of the sea. The following anonymous lines—“newspaper verse” they may be contemptuously described by some—make as admirable a pen picture of the little town as it were possible to reproduce.
“A little town on a far off hill—
(Fiesole, Fiesole!)
Mossy walls that defy Time’s will,
Olive groves in the sun a-thrill
Thickets of roses where thrushes trill
Winds that quiver and then are still—
Fiesole, Fiesole!”
Fiesole forms an irregular ground plan, rising and falling on the unequal ground upon which it is built. The long and almost unbroken line of Cyclopean walls towards the north is the portion which has suffered least from time or violence. The huge stones of which the Etruscan wall is composed are somewhat irregular in shape and unequal in size, seldom assuming a polygonal form. This Cyclopean construction varies with the geological nature of the rock employed. In all the Etruscan and Pelasgic towns it is found that, when sandstone was used, the form of the stones has been that of the parallelopipedon or nearly so, as at Fiesole and Cortona; whereas, when limestone was the subjacent rock, the polygonal construction alone is found, as at Cosa and Segni. This same observation will be found to apply to every part of the world, and in a marked degree to the Cyclopean constructions of Greece and Asia Minor, and even to the far-distant edifices raised by the Peruvian Incas. Sometimes the pieces of rock are dovetailed into each other; others stand joint above joint; but, however placed, the face, or outward front, is perfectly smooth. No projection, or work advancing beyond the line of the wall, appears in the remains of the original structure.
