mples were decorated with blazing frescoes, to which, I dare
say, Carpaccio may have lent a hand, if not that wild rake, Giorgione.
Here the pretty Queen, with eight thousand gold ducats a year, (whatever
that amount may have been,) and some seventy odd retainers, held her
court; and here Bembo, a dashing young fellow at that time of seven or
eight and twenty, became a party to those disquisitions on Love, and to
those recitations of song, part of which he has recorded in the
"Asolani." I am sorry to say, the beauty of the place, so far as regards
its artificial features, is now all gone. The hall, which may have
served as the presence-chamber of the Queen, was only a few years since
doing service as a farmer's barn; and the traces of a Diana and an
Apollo were still coloring the wall under which a few cows were
crunching their clover-hay.

All the gardening of Italy at that period, as, indeed, at almost all
times, depended very much upon architectural accessories: colonnades and
wall-veil with frescoes make a large part of Italian gardening to this
day. The Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore, and the Borghese Garden at
Rome, are fair types. And as I recall the sunny vistas of this last, and
the noontide loungings upon the marble seats, counting white flecks of
statues amid the green of cypresses, and watching the shadow which some
dense-topped pine flings upon a marble flight of steps or a marble
balustrade, I cannot sneer at the Italian gardening, or wish it were
other than it is. The art-life of Italy is the crowning and the
overlapping life. The Campagna seems only a bit of foreground to carry
the leaping arches of the aqueducts, and to throw the hills of Tivoli
and Albano to a purple distance. The farmers (_fattori_) who gallop
across the fields, in rough sheepskin wrappers, and upon scurvy-looking
ponies, are more picturesque than thrifty; and if I gallop in company
with one of them to his home upon the farther edge of the Campagna,
(which is an allowable wet-day fancy,) I shall find a tall stone house
smeared over roughly with plaster, and its ground-floor devoted to a
crazy cart, a pony, a brace of cows, and a few goats; a rude court is
walled in adjoining the house, where a few pigs are grunting. Ascending
an oaken stair-way within the door, I come upon the living-room of the
_fattore_; the beams overhead are begrimed with smoke, and garnished
here and there with flitches of bacon; a scant fire of fagots is
strug