Wharton, Edith; Parrish, Maxfield [Ill.]: Italian villas and their gardens (London: John Lane, 1904)

FLORENTINE VILLAS
yet so little are they out of harmony with the surround-
ing scene that nature has gradually taken them back to
herself, has turned them into a haunted grove in which
the statues seem like sylvan gods fallen asleep in their
native shade.
There are other Florentine villas which preserve traces
of their old gardens. The beautiful Villa Palmieri has
kept its terrace-architecture, Lappeggi its fine double
stairway, the Villa Danti its grass-walk leading to a
giant on the hilltop, and Castel Pulci its stately facade
with a sky-line of statues and the long cypress avenue
shown in Zocchi’s print; even Pratolino, so cruelly
devastated, still preserves Giovanni da Bologna's colossal
figure of the Apennines. But where so much of greater
value remains to be described, space fails to linger over
these fragments which, romantic and charming as they
are, can but faintly suggest, amid their altered surround-
ings, the vanished garden-plans of which they formed a
part.

57