You Cannot Attempt To
Pass Over Any Ground In Rome Without Danger Of Sinking Into Historical
Depths From Which It Will Be Hard To Extricate Yourself, And It Is Best
To Heed One's Steps And Keep Them To The Day's Activities.
But one
could not well visit the Villa Pamfili Doria without at least wishing to
remember that in 1849 Garibaldi held it for weeks against the whole
French army, in his defence of republican Rome.
A votive temple within
the villa grounds commemorates the invaders who fell in this struggle;
on a neighboring height the Italian leader triumphs in the monument his
adoring country has raised to him.
If we are to believe the censorious Hare, the love of the hero's
countrymen went rather far when the Roman municipality, to please him,
tried to change the course of the Tiber in conformity with a scheme of
his, and so spoiled the beauty of the Farnesina garden Avithout
effecting a too-difficult piece of engineering. The less passionate
Murray says merely that "a large slice of this garden was cut off to
widen the river for the Tiber embankment," and let us hope that it was
no worse. I suppose we must have seen the villa in its glory when we
went, in 1864, to see the Raphael frescos in the casino there, but in
the touching melancholy of the wasted and neglected grounds we easily
accepted the present as an image of the past. For all we remembered, the
weed-grown, green-mossed gravel-paths of the sort of bewildered garden
that remained, with its quenched fountain, its vases of dead or dying
plants, and its dishevelled shrubbery, were what had always been; and it
was of such a charm that we were gratefully content with it.
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