Such a city, seen from a terrace where a column of purest marble makes the rose tints of the sky more clearly felt, may well inspire her people to weave legends, even in this century of ours, as to her having been built by angels in the night. Between the cypresses the Duomo, sometimes so russet brown above the city it is guarding, to-day is toned and mellowed in the winter sunlight, and the downward markings of its cupola shine like ribs of alabaster. Whiter still and fairer rises the campanile “coloured like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea shell.” The terraced garden of Rusciano, where granite columns with capitals encircled by dolphins rise amidst palms and magnolias, lies on the southern side of the villa facing the heights of Monticci. A watch-tower on the slopes, a little village in the plain with pointed bell-tower rising above the jutting roofs of peasant houses low-lying among the fruit trees, hills palely outlined, their cypress-covered summits seen against still paler distance, pine trees along the valley wreathed in mist and nearer, olive trees reflecting, like so many mirrors, the radiant hues of the morning sunlight on each of their small pointed leaves—all these things and many more we see from the garden of Rusciano. FOOTNOTES: [27] _Filippo Brunelleschi, sein Leben und seine Werke_, von Cornel von Fabriczy. Stuttgard, 1892. [Illustration: VILLA DI POGGIO IMPERIALE.] [Illustration: (Drawing of gardent of Villa Di Poggio Imperiale)] VILLA DI POGGIO IMPERIALE About a mile outside Porta Romana on the heights of Arcetri stands the fine Villa Poggio Imperiale, now a school for girls. Formerly it was called Poggio Baroncelli, from the rich and powerful family of that name who owned large possessions on this side of Florence, and turned an old castle into a dwelling-house; but they failed in 1487, when the villa and much of the land belonging to it became the property of Agnolo Pandolfini, whose descendants sold it to Piero d’Alamanno Salviati. In 1548 the Salviati were declared rebels and Cosimo I seized all their possessions.