The principal residence of the unhappy couple at this period was the solitary villa of Pratolino. The name will be familiar to most travellers in Italy; for the pretty park on the slope of the Apennine, with its magnificent view of the vale of Arno and distant Florence far beneath it, has become a favourite haunt of Florentine pic–nic parties. And the bright green glades, cool mountain air, and fine old trees, make the scenery more like that of English pleasure grounds than perhaps any other spot in Italy. But the dwelling in which the moody Duke hid himself and his wife from the hate–envenomed eyes of his subjects, exists no longer. Of the pleasure villa, the title of which, like that of many another pleasure scheme, turned out to be so mocking a satire on the designer of stone and mortar happiness, not one block remains upon another. It was situated about eight miles from Florence, in the direction of Bologna, a distance sufficient to secure to Francesco perfect retirement, and that total neglect of all state business and cares in which he indulged during the latter years of his reign. The contemporary accounts[208] which have come down to us of the manner of life he led, shut up in his solitary villa with the unhappy Bianca, are so strange, as to warrant us in concluding that some touch of insanity must have mingled in the disastrously combined elements of his mental and physical constitution. The extraordinary excesses recorded as having been habitual to him are more like the freaks of a madman than the indulgences of a voluptuary. [Sidenote: DUCAL HABITS.] We hear of his abuse of distilled waters and elixirs; his "immoderate and pernicious familiarity[209] with oil of vitriol, and too frequent use of distilled cinnamon water." His food was always compounded with "hot spices, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and pepper." He would take before eating, during his meal, and after it, a quantity of raw eggs, filled with the hot red pepper of Spain. He was fond of the most indigestible kinds of food, and would eat to excess of raw garlic and capsicums, raw onions, radishes, leeks, and roots of various sorts, with enormous quantities of the strongest cheese. His wine was always of the most fiery and heady sorts. And when he had heated himself beyond endurance with inordinate quantities of such burning liquors and spices, and loaded his stomach with such crudities, he would drink large quantities of iced water, plunge his head and hands in snow, and go to bed in iced sheets. This latter practice was his constant habit; and the writer of the letter cited above says that he did so in imitation of Prospero Colonna and other men of note of that time,—a not improbable trait in the character of a man who refused to mourn his child's death in imitation of another great man.