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Updated: June 12, 2025
The feverish Spaniards called this phantom lode the Madre d'Oro, or "Mother of Gold." Now it is located in Mexico, now in India or Peru, California or Australia. Tradition says that Montezuma got his gold from this great vein, which lay in a secret valley whose where-abouts was jealously guarded by three priests of the war tribe, sole possessors of the knowledge.
He was now comfortably installed at the Villa Passi, and the day some of our footsore men limped into Treviso, he was lunching with his Staff, all bright and polished and sleek, in the Hotel Stella d'Oro. We all expected, for days, that he would call a parade and address the men who had saved what he used to call "his guns," or at least that he would send some message.
Passing through a little olive wood which lay between his own grounds and the sea, he paused as he came out of the shadow of the trees and looked towards the height crowned by the Palazzo d'Oro, where from the upper windows twinkled a few lights showing the position of the room where the "master of the world" lay stretched in brainless immobility, waited upon by medical nurses ever on the watch, and a wife of whom he knew nothing, guarding him with the fixed devotion of a faithful dog rather than of a human being.
From the extremely learned and incisive tone of her letters he had judged her to be an elderly woman of profound scholarship who had spent the greater part of her life in study, and his astonishment at the sight of the small, dainty creature who received him in the library of the Palazzo d'Oro was beyond all verbal expression, in fact, he took some minutes to recover from the magnetic "shock" of her blue eyes and wistful smile.
What more enjoyable dinner can be imagined than a flask of excellent Montepulciano, a well-cooked steak, and a little goat's cheese in the inn of the Leone d'Oro at Chiusi? The windows are open, and the sun is setting. Monte Cetona bounds the view to the right, and the wooded hills of Citt
No wonder she was named of poets, "Concho d'Oro," the Golden Shell! I lingered for some time, perfectly fascinated by the beauty of the scene. Passing through the crowded little town of Monreale probably a city in the times of the Greeks and Romans I gained the piazza where the beautiful Cathedral, with Benedictine Abbey attached, was situated.
In like manner, there was the Temple of S. Piero in Ciel d'Oro at Pavia, in which place is the body of S. Augustine, in a tomb that is in the sacristy, covered with little figures, which, according to my belief, is by the hands of Agostino and Agnolo, the sculptors of Siena.
Then she roused herself from her long abstraction and looked through the window of her cabin, watching what seemed to be the gradual rising of the land towards the air-ship, showing in little green and brown patches like the squares of a chess-board, then the houses and towns, tiny as children's toys then the azure gleam of the sea and the boats dancing like bits of cork upon it, then finally the plainer, broader view, wherein the earth with its woods and hills and rocky promontories appeared to heave up like a billow crowned with varying colours, and so steadily, easily down to the pattern of grass and flowers from the centre of which the Palazzo d'Oro rose like a little white house for the abode of fairies.
In this circle were to be found, among others, Bernardo Bibbiena, the patron of Berni, of whom Raphael has left us a portrait which is now in the Pitti Palace; Giuliano de' Medici, whose marble statue by Michael Angelo may still be seen in San Lorenzo at Florence; Cardinal Pietro Bembo, who had in his youth fallen a victim to the charms of Lucrezia Borgia when she first went to Ferrara; Emilia Pia, the wife of Antonio da Montefeltro, who is described as "a lady of so lively wit and judgment, that she seems to govern the whole company"; and last, but far from least, Baldassare Castiglione, that model courtier and fine wit, who has left a picture of Urbino in his celebrated book Il Cortegiano, which was long known in Italy as Il Libro d'Oro.
Yet further off, at the hand of the defile, looms the barren summit of Monte Venere, with Monte d'Oro and other hills in the foreground, and northward, peak after peak, travels the close Messina range. A landscape of sky, sea, plain, and mountains, great masses majestically grouped, grand in contour! Yet to call it sublime does not render the impression it makes upon the soul.
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