Excerpt from The Old Gardens of Italy: How to Visit Them During the dark ages that succeeded it is un likely that anyone maintained or laid out villas, and even in the sixteenth century, that golden time of art, we meet with no gardens south of Rome, The topiarius was the slave entrusted with the difficult and responsible task of clipping the hedges and designing and keeping in shape the various animals represented in box and other shrubs and the clipped inscriptions. These were very elaborate, but happily the custom was so modified in the best xvith century gardens that except in three cases where the name of the villa is cut in box, the writer has never seen any topiary work in Italy that could be objected to. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.