Jeffrey Smart painted this landscape from an apartment he rented in Rome on the Via dei Riari. In his 1996 autobiography he wrote: ‘… The most attractive area, for me, was the old medieval part … around Piazza Farnese, across the river in Trastevere. It was here that we came across an apartment with a roof terrace … it looked across the narrow street right into the garden of the Corsini palace … we were looking into about 10 hectares of garden. Some of it was used for the film Adam and Eve for the Eden scenes, and you could hear nightjars calling each other, it was so wild, in the centre of the city.’
