The property in question has since that time passed through several hands, and the traveller who has visited Florence will be most likely to remember it by the name of its last proprietor, as the Palazzo Strozzi. He will probably not have forgotten the large gardens which stretch behind it, and which through all changes have kept their original name, being still known as the "Orti Oricellari." These gardens, with the dwelling attached to them, were in the latter years of the fifteenth century the property of Giorgio Rucellai, the celebrated philosopher and historian. The house was then a "casino," belonging to the gardens, instead of being, as it now is, a palace, to which they are an appendage. And the writers of the time, who have frequently spoken of them, call them a "selva;" so that we must picture the place to our imaginations as very different from the trim garden which we now see. [Sidenote: ORTI ORICELLARI.] It was to this spot that Lorenzo the Magnificent's Platonic Academy moved its sittings at his death in 1492. It was there that the brothers Palla and Giovanni Rucellai, sons of Giorgio, received Leo X.[174] when he came to Florence in 1515, and performed before him Giovanni's tragedy of "Rosmunda," composed in imitation of the Hecuba of Euripides,—one of the first, if not perhaps the first, tragic representation in Italy. It was there, too, that as times grew worse in Florence, and the minds of good citizens had to occupy themselves with matters more grave than Platonic philosophy and tragedies in imitation of Euripides, Macchiavelli read those discourses on the first Decade of Livy, which were so well calculated to rouse a spirit of patriotism, with which the author himself seems to have sympathised so imperfectly. It was there, also, that these readings bore their fruit in that unsuccessful conspiracy against the Cardinal Giulio, afterwards Clement VII., for which Jacopo da Diaceto lost his head; and in consequence of which the Academy was extinguished, and its members dispersed. In these gardens, also, Macchiavelli laid the scene of his dialogue on the Art of War. He describes the thickness and vast height of the trees,[175] several of which were of kinds unknown to Fabrizio Colonna, who is one of the interlocutors in the dialogue. He commemorates the extraordinary freshness of the herbage, the retired tranquillity and sylvan beauty of the spot, enclosed as it was within the buildings of a walled city; and speaks of this style of culture, contrasted with that which we call Italian gardening, as the ancient manner of cultivation. And now this pleasant place, which was on so many accounts classical ground to the Florentines, was made the harbour of the very different sort of "Academy" which Bianca assembled around her, and the principal scene of their fooleries—to use a charitable term.