It Was By One Of Those Accidents Which Are The Best Fortunes Of Travel
That I Visited The Villa Papa Giulio, When I Thought I Was Merely Going
To The Piazza Del Popolo, To Which One Cannot Go Too Often.
A chance
look at my guide-book beguiled me with the notion that the villa was
just outside the gate; but it was a deceit which I should be glad to
have practised on me every February 17th of my life.
If the villa was
farther off than I thought, the way to it lay for a while through a
tramwayed suburban street delightfully encumbered with wide-horned oxen
drawing heavy wagon-loads of grain, donkeys pulling carts laden with
vegetables, and children and hens and dogs playing their several parts
in a perspective through which one would like to continue indefinitely.
But after awhile a dim, cool, curving lane leaves this street and
irresistibly invites your cab to follow it; and sooner than you could
ask you get to the villa gate. There a gatekeeper tacitly wonders at
your arriving before he is well awake, and will keep you a good five
minutes while he parleys with another custodian before he can bring
himself to sell you a ticket and let you into the beautiful, old,
orange-gray cloistered court, where there is a young architect with the
T-square of his calling sketching some point of it, and a gardener
gently hacking off from the parent stems such palm-leaves as have
survived their usefulness.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 171 of 353
Words from 46872 to 47128
of 97259
