The Gardens of the Villa Borghese

The wooded and flowery lawns are more beautiful than the finest of English park-scenery, more touching, more impressive, through the neglect that leaves Nature so much to her own ways and methods. Since man seldom interferes with her, she sets to work in her quiet way, and makes herself at home. There is enough of human care, it is true, bestowed long ago, and still bestowed, to prevent wildness from growing into deformity; and the result is an ideal landscape, a woodland scene, that seems to have been projected out of a poet's mind. If the ancient faun were other than a mere creation of old poetry, and could have re-appeared anywhere, it must have been in such a scene as this.

In the openings of the woods, there are fountains plashing into marble basins, the depths of which are shaggy with water-weeds; or they tumble like natural cascades from rock to rock, sending their murmur afar, to make the quiet and silence more appreciable. Scattered here and there, with careless artifice, stand old altars, bearing Roman inscriptions. Statues, gray with the long corrosion of even that soft atmosphere, half hide and half reveal themsleves, high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen and broken on the turf. Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite, porticoes, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood-paths, either veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful ruin on them, that they are better than if really antique. At all events, grass grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers root themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of temples, and clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the thousandth summer since their winged steeds alighted there. What a strange idea - what a needless labour - to construct artificial ruins in Rome, the native soil of Ruin! But even these sportive imitations, wrought by man in emulation of what Time has done to temples and palaces, are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions, have grown to be venerable in sober earnest. The result of all is a scene, pensive, lovely, dreamlike, enjoyable, and sad, such as is to be found nowhere save in these princely villa-residences, in the neighbourhood of Rome; a scene that must have required generations and ages, during which growth, decay, and man's intelligence, wrought kindly together, to render it so gently wild as we behold it now.

The final charm is bestowed by the Malaria. There is a piercing, thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown away, or only enjoyed at its half-development, in winter and early spring, and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home-scenery for any human being. For if you come hither in summer, and stray through these glades in the golden sunset, Fever walks arm in arm with you, and Death awaits you at the end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in its loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond the scope of man's actual possessions.
The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorn (1860), Chapter VIII, 'The Suburban Villa'