Wherever their footsteps strayed they left a memory of love. The
forgotten churches of the Aventine--Santa Sabina with its wonderful
columns of Parian marble, the charming garden of Santa Maria del
Priorata, the campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin piercing the azure
with its slender rose-coloured spire grew to know them well. The villas
of the cardinals and the princes--the Villa Pamfili mirrored in its
fountains and its lakes, all sweetness and grace, where every shady
grove seems to harbour some noble idyll; the Villa Albani, cold and
silent as a church, with its avenues of sculptured marble and
centenarian trees; where in the vestibules, under the porticos and
between the granite pillars, Caryatides and Hermes, symbols of
immobility, gaze at the immutable symmetry of the verdant lawns; and the
Villa Medici--like a forest of emerald green spreading away in a fairy
tale, and the Villa Ludovici--a little wild--redolent of violets,
consecrated by the presence of that Juno adored by Goethe in the days
when the plane-trees and the cypresses, that one might well have thought
immortal, had already begun to tremble with the foreboding of sale and
death--all the patrician villas, the crowning glory of Rome, became well
acquainted with their love. The picture and sculpture galleries too--the
room in the Borghese where, before Correggio's 'Danae' Elena smiled as
at her own reflection; and the Mirror Room, where her image glided among
the Cupids of Ciro Ferri and the garlands of Mario de' Fiori; the
chamber of Heliodorus, where Raphael has succeeded in making the dull
walls throb and palpitate with life; and the apartments of the Borgias,
where the great fantasia of Penturicchio unfolds its marvellous web of
history, fable, dreams, caprices and audacities; and the Galatea Room,
through which is diffused an ineffable freshness, a perennial serenity
of light and grace; and the room where the Hermaphrodite, that gentle
monster, offspring of the loves of a nymph and a demi-god, extends his
ambiguous form amidst the sparkle of polished stone--all these
unfrequented abodes of Beauty were well acquainted with them.
Pages:
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84