The Villa Tiberiana, though not quite so imperial as it sounds, is one of the most "amiable dwellings." It stands high on the hill-side above the huddled, picturesque little town of Alatri, and is approachable only by a steep cobbled path that winds deviously between other scattered houses and plots of vineyard. Having arrived at the piazza of the town, the carriage road goes no further, and you must needs walk, while your luggage is conveyed up by strapping female porters, whom on their arrival you reward with _soldi_ and refresh with wine. Whitewashed and thick-built, two-storied and flat-roofed, it crouches behind the tall rubble wall of its garden that lies in terraces below it. A great stone-pine rears its whispering umbrella in the middle of this plot, and now in the May-time of the year there is to be seen scarcely a foot of the earth of its garden beds, so dense is the tapestry of flowers that lies embroidered over it. For here in the far south of Europe, the droughts of summer and early autumn render unpractical any horticultural legislation with a view to securing colour in your flower-beds all the year round. However much you legislated, you would never get your garden to be gay through July and August, and so, resigning yourself to emptiness then, you console yourself with an intoxication of blossom from March to June. And never was a garden so drunk with colour as is ours to-day; never have I seen so outrageous a riot. Nor is it in the garden-beds alone that rose and carnation and hollyhock and nasturtium and delphinium unpunctually but simultaneously sing and blaze together. The southern front of the house is hidden in plumbago and vines with green seed-pearl berries, and as for the long garden wall, it is literally invisible under the cloak of blue morning-glory that decks it as with a raiment from foundation to coping-stone. Every morning fresh battalions of blue trumpets deploy there as soon as the sun strikes it, and often as I have seen it thus, I cannot bring myself to believe that it is real; it is more like some amazing theatrical decoration. Beyond on the further side lies the orchard of fig and peach, and I observe with some emotion that the figs, like the lady in Pickwick, are swelling visibly.