In 1824 Villa Palmieri was bought by Miss Mary Farhill from the executors of the last of the Palmieri. She was an odd woman, but the Florentines appear to have liked her, and she was a favourite of the Grand Duchess Marie Antoinette to whom she left her villa, and who sold it in 1874 to the Earl of Crawford. He planted the hillside behind the villa and made the gardens once more resemble the impassioned description in the _Decameron_. As a scholar and a student his name stands high, and he will long be remembered in his Tuscan home for many a kindly and charitable act. In 1888 and in 1893 Lady Crawford lent her beautiful villa to H.M. Queen Victoria. Villa Palmieri has always been identified with the second villa visited by the seven maidens and the three youths in the _Decameron_. Baldelli, in his Life of Boccaccio, tells us that “owning a small villa in the parish of Majano, Boccaccio took pleasure in describing the surrounding country, more especially the lovely slopes and rich valleys of the Fiesolean hills near his modest dwelling. Thus in the enchanting picture he has drawn of the first halting-place of the joyous company we recognise Poggio Gherardo, and in the sumptuous palace chosen by them afterwards, in order not to be disturbed by tiresome visitors, the beautiful Villa Palmieri. His fairy-like description of the tiny circular valley into which Elisa led the lovely ladies to disport themselves and bathe in the heat of the day, brings that small flat meadow before us, through which the Affrico, after having divided two hills and abandoned their stony ledges, meandering unites his waters in a canal in the adjacent plain under the cloister of Doccia at Fiesole.”