We look down on this July richness from the small white house with its green blinds, which, though compact, round-windowed, comfortably Georgian, has yet an absurd Italian look.
On the upper terrace wall the ornamental pots, each with its little golden cypress, begin to foam with lobelia and creeping geranium; between two clumps of cypress-trees, Verocchio’s little smiling boy grips his fish against a tangle of blush rambler. And that’s a bit of Italy for you, even with the ultimate vision of wild moor!
The terraces run down the hill, tier below tier. On the other side of the valley the woods rise between the shouldering heather-clad hills, to the east; the wide, long view spreads to the south-west, where the hills begin to lift again, and distant pine-woods march across the sky.
Would we could but give to mere words the sense of altitude, of great horizons which our high-perched position gives us!
“You’re in a kind of eyrie,” says one visitor. And another: “Oh, I do like all this sky! It’s so seldom one really gets the sky about one.”
“You have,” said an exile--an old Belgian religious--after tottering solemnly along the terrace walk, “you have here an earthly paradise. A spot God has wonderfully blessed.”
Besides the startling contrasts and the fairness of its prospect, the little place has a special charm of its own, which is not possible to describe, yet which everyone feels who comes within its precincts. We quite wait for the phrase now, upon the lips of guests under the red-tiled roof: “It’s so extraordinarily peaceful.”
Peace! Peace in the midst of the boom of the war tocsin, echoing all round! Peace, in spite of the newspapers, the letters, the rumours, the perpetual coming and going of troops, the distant reverberations of gun practice, the never-relaxing grip of apprehension! Yes, in spite of all the world being at war--there is peace in the Villino.
Some of us believe it wells out from a little chamber, where, before the golden shrine, the Donatello angels hold up never-extinguished lamps. Or a visitor may say wonderingly: “I think it must be because you’re all so united.” Or, perhaps, as the old monk had it, there is an emanation from the place itself: so beautiful a spot of God’s earth, so high up, so apart between the moor and the valley! Whatever the reason, we wish that some of the peace that lingers here may reach out from these pages, and touch with serenity any unquiet heart or restless spirit that comes their way.