whole grotto can be filled with water, and all the seats will squirt water over your breech; then, as you flee from the grotto and run up the staircase into the mansion on the other side, a pleasant trick will make the water stream from two of the steps in a thousand jets which drench you till you reach the top. The beauty and splendour of this place cannot be set forth properly by details. Below the mansion is an alley, fifty feet wide and about five hundred paces in length, which at great cost has been made almost level.[44] On either side are long and very beautiful benches of worked stone, every five or every ten paces. Along by these benches are built in the wall the mouths of artificial fountains, so that all down the alley are jets of water. At the end is a fair fountain discharging itself into a great basin through a marble statue, carved in the similitude of a woman starching linen. She is represented wringing a tablecloth, fashioned in marble, and it is in dripping from this cloth that the water finds its way out. Below is another vessel to contain the hot water for making the starch. In a chamber of the mansion is a marble table with places for six, each of which is fitted with a cover to be raised by a ring. Beneath each of these covers is a basin with a supply of fresh water, wherewith each guest might cool his glass, and in the middle of the table a large space for the bottle. We saw also great holes in the ground where a large quantity of snow was kept all through the year. It is set upon litter of broom and then covered with straw in high pyramidal form like a small barn. There are a thousand reservoirs; and the duke was at this time busied in making a colossus, the eye-socket of which is three cubits in width and all the rest in proportion.[45] The thousand reservoirs and pools are supplied from two springs through a vast number of earthen pipes. In a large and beautiful bird-cage we saw some little birds resembling goldfinches, with two long tail feathers like large capons; and there is also a curious hothouse. We tarried some two or three hours in this place, and then, having resumed our journey, we went for seventeen miles along the crest of divers small hills and arrived at Florence.