Monte Guffone was built at a time when castles and watch-towers were needed on the Tuscan hills, and the Acciajuoli, rivals of the Peruzzi and Bardi, determined to have a fortress-villa that should be a visible sign of their power and magnificence. The site chosen for it was the hilly country near San Casciano, between the river Pesa and the streamlet Virginio, a little off the high road to Volterra, commanding a varied landscape of vast woods of pine and oak, farms surrounded by olive-groves and vineyards, and hill-set villages with winding roads overhung with rosemary bushes. The first glimpse of Monte Guffone seen across the misty waves of olives is of a grand and shapely massed group of building, resting like a citadel on the shoulder of the hills. From its midst rises a tall tower closely resembling that of Palazzo Vecchio—with the difference that it starts straight from the ground. Upon nearing the villa there is a delightful sense of variety, as successive generations of the Acciajuoli have given it a different character until finally it has become a beautiful but somewhat baroque seventeenth century villa. Still, when walking on the broad balcony which probably covers the ancient bastions, there is the feeling of a great house built for defence, and the tower has been left untouched in a courtyard into which look large Michelangelesque windows framed with dark stone and set at regular intervals one from another, forming a perfect piece of work of its kind, and contrasting pleasantly with the mediæval watch-tower. On the northern side of the villa a façade has been added giving it almost an ecclesiastical appearance, enhanced by the group of sedate and sombre cypresses and ilexes growing at one corner of this otherwise joyous looking building. To the same period belongs the grand stone staircase on the garden side, leading down to a grotto encrusted with shells and ornamented with statues of the seasons, which even in their present shattered condition recall the past almost Medicean splendour of the place. The wall slopes out with spreading bastions forming an entrance to the grotto as though the architect had remembered the gateway of some Etruscan city, and above the arch is set a shield, supported by cupids, with the lions of the Acciajuoli house. [Illustration: VILLA DI MONTE GUFFONE.] This once magnificent villa, now let out in tenements to poor people, was built, or at all events enlarged, early in the fourteenth century by the Grand Seneschal Acciajuoli, whose family first appears in Florentine history in the thirteenth century as merchants, rivalling, if they did not surpass, the Bardi and the Peruzzi in wealth. One of them, Niccola, stands gibbeted to all time by Dante. He and Baldo d’Aguglione, aided by the Podestà, tore out a sheet of the public records of the city in order to destroy the proof of certain frauds committed. Ironically Dante refers to the “well-guided city,” praising the old days—