cooking utensils. Maria Gismondi also had a little property.

To this pair was born, probably in 1526, a boy whom they named
Giovanni Pierluigi, which means John Peter Louis. This boy, from a
tiniest child, loved beauty of sight and sound. And this is not at
all surprising, for a child surrounded from infancy by the natural
loveliness and glory of old Palestrina, would unconsciously breathe in
a sense of beauty and grandeur.

It was soon discovered the boy had a voice, and his mother is said
to have sold some land she owned to provide for her son's musical
training.

From the rocky heights on which their town was built, the people
of Palestrina could look across the Campagna--the great plain
between--and see the walls and towers of Rome. At the time of our
story, Saint Peter's had withstood the sack of the city, which
happened a dozen years before, and Bramante's vast basilica had
already begun to rise. The artistic life of Rome was still at high
tide, for Raphael had passed away but twenty years before, and Michael
Angelo was at work on his Last Judgment.

Though painting and sculpture flourished, music did not keep pace with
advance in other arts. The leading musicians were Belgian, Spanish or
French, and their music did not match the great achievements attained
in the kindred art of the time--architecture, sculpture and painting.
There was needed a new impetus, a vital force. Its rise began when
the peasant youth John Peter Louis descended from the heights of
Palestrina to the banks of the Tiber.