The wine of Artimino was famous all over Tuscany even in the days when Redi, court physician to the Grand Duke Cosimo III, drank deeply of its vintage and sang enthusiastically of its perfections in his _Bacco in Toscana_:— “Gods my life, what glorious claret! Blessed be the ground that bare it! ’Tis Avignon. Don’t say a flask of it, Into my soul I pour a cask of it. Artimino’s finer still, Under a tun there’s no having one’s fill:”[81] The Villa Ferdinanda is less famous than it should be, for although some visit it and return to spread among their friends a description of its grandeur and beauty, few are tempted to climb the steep and winding road to the summit of the hill. Again—the house, although seen from a great distance, stands so high above the sea level (260 metres) that it gives only the impression of being very large and almost overbalanced by an enormous projecting roof, and but little idea is obtained of its architectural beauty. The lower part of the hill is scarred by quarries of _pietra serena_ and the landscape is a little bare and arid; but as we climb the narrow winding road we soon get into a delightfully cool and remote corner of the Arno valley, where the slopes are overgrown with thick masses of broom while ilexes and a few cypresses rise above the shimmering green of the young oaks. In parts stunted oaks form a hedge, broken in parts where rocks jut out covered with trailing ivy. Every step leads us to a fairer and more extensive view. A deep azure blue of sky and plain with paler blue of the Pistojan mountains rising to the west, seen across the Artimino fields of crimson clover as we stand within the light shade of a wood where no dark shadows lie, hold the very essence of a Tuscan morning in early May. This a place from which we can best see the limitless stretch of the valley from Florence down towards the sea, the windings of the calm river and the deepening glow of colour on the hills and about the white townlets of Sesto and Prato; and as the distant murmur of the workers in the valley rise up to us, behind in the trees “The nightingale with feathers new she sings.”