This reviewer opened Italian Pleasure Gardens, by Miss Rose Standish
Nichols (Williams and Norgate, 42s.), at the page where it is stated that the best garden at Portofino is that of the Villa Carnarvon. Near by, at Paraggi, exists one of the most remarkable terraced gardens on the whole Italian Riviera. Some such lacunae are probably inevitable in a work of this description ; a rather more serious defect is that the sequence of the descriptions is not well planned. The garden lover in Rome, for instance, will want to know in what order he can best plan his excursions. The same is true of Florence. If we would wander in the villas where the Medici discussed Plato, and cultivated their rare plants, it is distracting to be hurried back to the other side of the Arno merely because the Medicis also owned the Boboli Gardens. Perhaps maps as well as illustrations would be too much to ask, but without them and some geographical re-arrangement of the text, we feel that Miss Nichols comes a little short of having produced a really first-rate book. Yet there is magnificent material here. We would particularly recommend the chapter on the Ville Farnese, Lante and d'Este—" visions of paradise trans- lated into trees, flowers, stones and water." Miss Nichols writes with knowledge and feeling on the work of Vignola.
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