The villa-gardens in and about Rome! I cannot write the words without an ache of heart, for I know that they are disappearing rapidly, inevitably. Along the Via Salaria I saw three in process of destruction during the late winter and spring of 1889. A great slice of the Borghese grounds is being devastated to make room for hideous streets and squares. The Wolkonski gardens have been curtailed; those of Villa Massimo Arsoli adjoining, almost destroyed and built over; the Rospigliosi gardens gone; others doomed; the glorious Ludovisi gardens, with their cypresses and ilexes towering above the closed Porta Pinciana and the ancient boundary wall, are in process of extermination. "The grounds, which were of an extent extraordinary when considered as being within the walls of a capital, were laid out by Le Nôtre, and were in the stiff French style of high-clipped hedges, and avenues adorned with vases and sarcophagi. With the fury against trees which characterizes Italians, all the magnificent ilexes and cypresses were cut down as soon as the land was secured, and the plots of building-land rendered altogether hideous and undesirable. In a few years not a trace will remain of the picturesque glories of this once noble villa, which, if acquired by the municipality, who refused to purchase it, might have been made into public gardens of beauty unrivalled in any European capital." [4]
The railway station, with its sheds and sidings, occupies the once matchless gardens of the Villa Massimo Negroni, celebrated for its exquisite cypress avenues and its stately terrace, lined with ancient orange-trees and noble sarcophagi. The ground was confiscated by the State, and the destruction of this fair scene broke the heart of the owner, Prince Massimo. The sweet gardens of the Villa Strozzi are gone, now built over with ugly houses. Outside the Porta Pia grand old gardens are being devastated also.
The Medici gardens remain; Hawthorn thus described them. "They are laid out in the old fashion of straight paths, with borders of box, which form hedges of great height and density, and are shorn and trimmed to the evenness of a wall of stone at the top and sides. There are green alleys, with long vistas, overshadowed by ilex-trees; and at each intersection of the paths the visitor finds seats of lichen-covered stone to repose on, and marble statues that look forlornly at him, regretful of their lost noses. In the more open portions of the gardens, before the sculptured front of the villa, you see fountains and flower-beds; and, in their season, a profusion of roses, from which the genial sun of Italy distils a fragrance to be scattered abroad by the no less genial breeze."
The Boboli gardens at Florence remain to testify to the ancient arrangement, with high walls of evergreens and long avenues hedged up ten or twelve feet, dense and impervious, above which rise the spires of cypress and the domes of the stone-pine.
Garden from Tapestry.
Our English gardens were modelled on those of the Italian palaces, the same subdivision of squares into sections, with trimmed box enclosing them, and with a statue or a fountain, or a carved and shaped yew in the midst. The gardens were invariably enclosed within walls. Where the ground sloped, at great expense it was shaped into terraces, reached by flights of steps. The greatest exactness in the design was aimed at. As Pope observed—
"Each alley has a brother,