The first room at the top of the staircase is a large hall with a huge grey stone fireplace. How one would like to conjure up the magnificent Lorenzo and his friends; to listen entranced while Luigi Pulci declaimed a Canto of Morgante, or Messer Angelo Poliziano recited a Ballata; or hear the learned Greek Argyropoulos discuss philosophy with Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, Bernardo Rucellai, Leo Battista Alberti and Cristofano Landino, while Michelangelo Buonarroti sat by listening, his head resting on one hand like one of his own prophets. Out of the big hall one goes through three or four rooms on to a loggia facing west, with a brilliantly gay ceiling painted by Poccetti. Here, no doubt, the Academicians sat in the long summer evenings looking down on the garden with its fountains, and on the oak woods crowning the neighbouring hills. The last room on the south side of the house (on the first floor) was probably where Lorenzo de’ Medici died, and not the one generally pointed out to strangers. On an ancient plan of the villa the end room is found marked “the room of Messer Lorenzo,” and the small closet opening out of it, with a spiral staircase in the thickness of the wall leading down into the courtyard, is indicated as “the study of Messer Lorenzo.” From the courtyard one enters a fine vaulted and frescoed room leading into a loggia under the one painted by Poccetti. This has been closed in by glass windows, and here Mr Watts, while staying with Lord Holland, who rented Careggi when he was minister to the Tuscan court in 1845, painted a large fresco of the murder of Piero Leoni, doctor to Lorenzo. It is a fine work with daring and successful foreshortening. From the covered gallery round the top of the villa the view is splendid. To the south is “the delightful hill Montughi,” dotted with villas, to most of which is attached some story of love or bloodshed; then the towers and palaces of fair Florence backed with line upon line of blue and violet mountains. Looking westward we can follow the track of the Arno flowing down to the sea, until lost behind the hill on which stands Artimino, another Medici villa. The little town of Prato shines white in the sun, and if the day be at all clear Pistoja can be seen, with the rugged Apennines and the white peaks of the Carrara mountains in the distance. To the north, shielding Careggi from the harsh north wind, rises Monte de’ Vecchi, so-called because the great family of Vecchi, or Vecchietti, whose palaces stood on the site of the Campidoglio in the centre of Florence and were destroyed by the Ghibellines after the battle of Monteaperti, possessed villas and estates on its slopes.