given something of great value now demanded it back, as having been merely lent; others who had been wont to praise him to the skies, blamed him as an ungrateful and violent man. Wherefore too late did he repent that he had not believed Niccolò Soderini, and sought rather to die honoured with arms in hand, than live dishonoured amongst his victorious enemies.” Brunelleschi’s original design for Palazzo Pitti had only seven windows to the front, and Herr von Fabriczy in _Filippo Brunelleschi Sein Leben und Seine Werke_ writes: “The choice of such dimensions (59 metres wide and 38 metres high) shows that he immediately grasped the advantages of a position on sharply rising ground and knew how to use it as a mighty factor for the desired effect.... In order to gauge the talent with which Brunelleschi turned to signal advantage what in other hands would have been a cause of failure, one need only imagine any one of the Florentine palaces, with the exception of the Palazzo Vecchio, in the place of the Pitti palace, to realize what a miserably meagre impression they would make as the crowning edifice on the summit of the steep hill.” Vasari tells us “that Brunelleschi began and directed the building up to the second-floor windows,” so it cannot have been roofed in when Luca’s descendant Buonaccorso sold the huge unfinished pile to Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I., for 9,000 golden florins (about £5,400) in 1549. In the following spring Niccolò Braccini, better known by his surname of Tribolo, began to lay out the adjacent garden, the Grand Duchess having bought much land to enlarge it. The origin of the name--Boboli--is unknown. Some say it is an Etruscan word, others that a family called Borgoli owned the land, which then became commonly known as Bogoli and, as often happens in Italy, the “g” was changed into a “b.” Or it may be derived from the Tuscan name of the hoopoe--bubula--which frequents the garden in spring uttering its weird note hoop, hoop, hoop, among the ilex groves. However that may be, Tribolo made a wonderful garden that has been the delight of many generations.