How those young artists had enjoyed themselves in planning and producing the marvellous show! Painting pictures on canvas is all very well, but fancy the delight of making them live, on such a background, before people’s eyes—of handling all that superb material to embody visions that had haunted one despairingly for years, crying out to be used and shown! Upon my word, if I could start life over again and choose my own vocation, I believe I would make it that of a theatrical manager—an artist in flesh and blood!
Ancient Beauty of Villa Borghese—A Sylvan Siesta—The Woodland of the Borghese—The Heart of the Trees—The Borghese Anemone—Vintage Time in the Grape Countries—Tuscany, an Atmosphere of Purity and Calm—Bunches of Grapes Two Feet Long—Muscatels of Etruria—October Festivals at the Villa Borghese—Peasants of the Coast Towns—Picturesque Costume of the Albanese—Feast in the Private Garden—Fountains of Wine—Classic Chariot Races—The Passing of the Feudal System.
The recollection of the artists’ festival brings to my mind some festivals of other times, remembered by very few persons now alive. Next to those connected with the great religious anniversaries, the ones most appreciated by the Romans were, I think, the lavish entertainments given by Prince Borghese in his villa to celebrate the vintage, in October. The Villa Borghese, as every one knows, is a great pleasure park just outside the Porta del Popolo, but those who see it as it is now, exploited for the most vulgar commercial ends, and at the same time sadly neglected, can scarcely form an idea of its original plan and ancient beauty. Even in earlier days the fashionable crowd that drove there in the afternoon knew nothing of the remote dells and glades that lay lost in the great masses of woodland, of the meadows that spread beyond the woods, of statues and fountains shrined in the green and sequestered places that one might pass near a hundred times without becoming aware of their existence. It was one of the playgrounds of my babyhood, but even after I was grown up I sometimes made new discoveries there.