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Updated: April 30, 2025
"I remember thinking it happiness to dance with the contadinas at a village feast; to taste the new, sweet wine at vintage-time, and the old, ripened wine, which our podere is famous for, in the cold winter evenings; and to devour great, luscious figs, and apricots, peaches, cherries, and melons.
Towards sunset we all walked out into the podere, pausing a little while to look down into a well that stands on the verge of the lawn. Within the spacious circle of its stone curb was an abundant growth of maidenhair, forming a perfect wreath of thickly clustering leaves quite round, and trailing its tendrils downward to the water which gleamed beneath. It was a very pretty sight. Mr.
A podere, or cultivated tract, comprising several acres, belongs to the villa, and seems to be fertile, like all the surrounding country. The possessions of different proprietors are not separated by fences, but only marked out by ditches; and it seems possible to walk miles and miles, along the intersecting paths, without obstruction.
Turning then uphill, you come at last to a group of houses, and where the way turns suddenly there is the Oratorio del Vannella, in the parish of Settignano: it is truly just an old wayside tabernacle, but within is one of the earliest works, a Madonna and Child, of Botticelli, whose father had a podere hereabout.
The podere should be sold as soon as it could be put in order. Such pictures as the Italian Government coveted, it should keep, the rest should go to the Museum at Boston. He himself would grow orange trees in North Cuba where there were things to shoot and, thank heaven, no civilisation.
The palace garden descended, terrace by terrace, to the rocks, being, indeed, less a garden than what is called a villa in the Liguria, and a podere in Tuscany, a fascinating mixture of vine, olive, maize, flowers, and corn. A fountain in marble, lined with maiden-hair, played at the junction of each flight of steps.
This was a manner and a mood, at any rate, in all the land, that favoured in the late afternoons the divinest landscape blues and purples not to speak of its favouring still more my practical contention that the whole guarded headland in question, with the immense ramparts of golden brown and red that dropped into vineyards and orchards and cornfields and all the rustic elegance of the Tuscan <i>podere</i>, was knitting for me a chain of unforgettable hours; to the justice of which claim let these divagations testify.
You can leave it behind, passing into a lane behind Poggio Gherardo, where it is roses, roses all the way, for the podere is hedged with a hedge of roses pink and white, where the iris towers too, streaming its violet banners.
In 1869-70, George Eliot and Mr. Lewes visited Italy for the fourth time. I had since the date of their former visit quitted my house in Florence, and established myself in a villa and small podere at Ricorboli, a commune outside the Florentine Porta San Niccolò. And there I had the great pleasure of receiving them under my roof, assisted in doing so by my present wife.
It used to be thought that the Villa Poggio Gherardo, Mrs. Ross's beautiful home on the way to Settignano, was the first refuge, and the Villa Palmieri the second, but the latest researches have it that the Palmieri was the first and the Podere della Fonte, or Villa di Boccaccio, as it is called, near Camerata, a little village below S. Domenico, the other.
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