'Even in December it is full of flowers - canea and chrysanthemum, rose and iris, heliotrope and purple veronica. Broken statues and columns peep from among the greenery; here the marble bust of a dead Roman is crowned by a spray of tiny red roses which have not realized in this sheltered pleasaunce that winter has come; there some broken amphorae are half hidden in a clump of yuccas. In the heart of the garden where the four paths meet is a lichen-covered fountain almost smothered in waterplants, which never tires of singing to a dying cypress, the only one of all the five planted by the hand of Michelangelo himself, which still stretches its tired old limbs in the sunshine.'
from The Colour of Rome - Olave Potter
