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 struggling into blaze upon an open hearth; and on a low table bare of either cloth or cleanliness, there waits him his supper of polenta, which is nothing more or less than our plain boiled Indian-pudding.  Add to this a red-eyed dog, that seems to be a savage representative of a Scotch colley,—­a lean, wrinkled, dark-faced woman, who is unwinding the bandages from a squalling Bambino,—­a mixed odor of garlic and of goats, that is quickened with an ammoniacal pungency,—­and you may form some idea of the home of a small Roman farmer in our day.  It falls away from the standard of Cato; and so does the man.

He takes his twenty or thirty acres, upon shares, from some wealthy proprietor of Rome, whose estate may possibly cover a square mile or two of territory.  He sells vegetables, poultry, a little grain, a few curds, and possibly a butt or two of sour wine.  He is a type of a great many who lived within the limits of the old Papal territory; whether he and they have dropped their musty sheepskins and shaken off their unthrift under the new government, I cannot say.

Around Bologna, indeed, there was a better race of farmers:  the intervening thrift of Tuscany had always its influence.  The meadows of Terni, too, which are watered by the Velino, bear three full crops of grass in the season; the valley of the Clitumnus is like a miniature of the Genesee; and around Perugia the crimson-tasselled clovers, in the season of their bloom, give to the fields the beauty of a garden.