la Imperiale. It was
enlarged later by Eleonora Gonzaga, the wife of Francesco Maria della
Rovere, the heir of Urbino, and Giovanni Sforza's successor in the
dominion of Pesaro. Famous painters decorated it with allegoric and
historical pictures; Bembo and Bernardo Tasso sang of it in melodious
numbers, and there, in the presence of the Della Rovere court, Torquato
read his pastoral _Aminta_. This villa is now in a deplorable state of
decay. Pesaro offered but little in the way of entertainment for a young
woman accustomed to the society of Rome. The city had no nobility of
importance. The houses of Brizi, of Ondedei, of Giontini, Magistri,
Lana, and Ardizi, in their patriarchal existence, could offer Lucretia
no compensation for the inspiring intercourse with the grandees of Rome.
It is true the wave of culture which, thanks to the humanists, was
sweeping over Italy did reach Pesaro. The manufacture of majolica,
which, in its perfection, was not an unworthy successor of the pottery
of Greece and Etruria, flourished there and in the neighboring cities on
the Adriatic, and as far as Umbria. It had reached a considerable
development in the time of the Sforza. One of the oldest pieces of
majolica in the Correro Museum in Venice, Solomon worshiping the idol,
bears the date 1482. As early as the fourteenth century this art was
cultivated in Pesaro, and it was in a very nourishing condition during
the reign of Camilla d'Aragona. There are still some remains of the
productions of the old craftsmen of the city in the State-house of
Pesaro.

There, too, the intellectual movement manifested itself in other fields,
fostered by the Sforza or their wives, in emulation of Urbino and
Rimini, where Sigismondo Malatesta gathered about him poets and scholars
whom he pensioned during their lives, and for whom, when dead, he built
sarcophagi about the outer wall of the church. Camilla interested
herself especially in the cultivation of the sciences. In 1489 she
invited a noble Greek, Giorgio Diplovatazio, of Corfu, a kinsman of the
Laskaris and the Vatazes, who, fleeing from the Turks, had come to
Italy, and taken up his abode in Pesaro, where were living other Greek
exiles of the Angeli, Komnenen, and Paleologue families. Diplovatazio
had studied in Padua. Giovanni Sforza made him state's advocate of
Pesaro in 1492, and he enjoyed a brilliant reputation as a jurisprudent
until his death in 1541.[35]

Lucretia, consequently, found this i