The number of beautiful homes owned by the Medici strikes one with fresh surprise when visiting the villas of Petraja and Castello, which lie close together with a shady ilex wood between them, about three miles from Florence. Something of the old charm still lingers about them although the life of that time has departed, and few now pace the terraced walks, or sit in the shade of the quiet ilex woods, where once all the gay world of Florence thronged to hold court round their Medicean rulers. The charm of both villas now lies in their gardens and surroundings, and though so essentially Florentine each has its individual character—Petraja, within sight of the city, peaceful, amidst a garden of roses and carnations, its terraces sinking gradually down to the plain, with an enormous marble reservoir of clear green water, in which colossal carp disport themselves under the first one, on which the villa and a few huge ilexes stand. A rustic staircase twines round the trunk of the largest of these trees leading up to a platform among the branches, where Victor Emanuel used to dine. The view of Florence at one’s feet, surrounded by villa-crowned hills, is lovely, and Ariosto is said to have written his well-known lines while standing on the terrace of Petraja— “To see the hills with villas sprinkled o’er Would make one think that, even as flowers and trees, Here earth tall towers in rich abundance bore. “If gathered were thy scattered palaces Within a single wall, beneath one name, Two Romes would scarce appear so great as these.”[36] The beautiful fountain on the east side of the villa was removed from Castello and brought here by the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo. It is one of Tribolo’s masterpieces, and Vasari tells us “he carved on the marble base a mass of marine monsters, all plump and under-cut, with tails so curiously twisted together that nothing better can be done in that style; having finished it, he took a marble basin, brought to Castello long before ... and in the throat, near to the edge of the said basin, he made a circle of dancing boys holding certain festoons of marine creatures carved with excellent imagination out of the marble; also the stem to go above the said basin he executed with much grace, with boys, and masks for spouting out water of great beauty, and on the top of this stem Tribolo placed a bronze female figure a yard and a half high to represent Florence ... of which figure he had made a most beautiful model, wringing the water out of her hair with her hands.”[37]