| italian garden magic
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The traveller returning from Italy, with his eyes and imagination full of the ineffable Italian gardenmagic, knows vaguely that the enchantment exists; that he has been under its spell, and that it is more potent, more enduring, more intoxication to every sense than the most glowing effects of modern horticulture; but he may not have found the key to the mystery. Edith Wharton, Italian Villas, 1904
Seduction is at the heart of the mystery of the Renaissance garden.The Renaissance gardens of Pratolino, Castello and Petraia (to name only a few of the gardens that dot the hills around Florence) were designed with elaborate fountains, mechanical marvels, giochi d’acqua and grottos as pastoral settings for courtly seduction—Francesco de’ Medici celebrated his wedding to Bianca Cappello at Pratolino in 1589. But gardens are among the most fragile and least enduring art forms, however, and the ravages of time and fashion work swiftly to destroy them. Today, the renowned gardens of Pratolino, having first been turned into an ‘English garden’ at the end of the 18th century, have been virtually erased—only Giambologna’s brooding over-sized figure of the Appenines remains. So it was that the Americans who started arriving in Tuscany towards the end of the 19th century often discovered the gardens ruined, overgrown and unloved. But many Americans were seduced by—and presumably in—Italian gardens, and one by one they began to restore them. The gardens that form the backdrop of these conversations about the American artists in Tuscany at the end of the 19th and early party of the 20th centuries were all restored—at least in part—by the English and Americans who fell in love with them and were seduced by their “garden magic”:Villa Gamberaia by Princess Ghika and the American-born Mathilda Ledyard Cass, Baroness von Ketteler, Villa Medici by Lady Sybil Cutting,Villa i Tatti by Bernard Berenson and Villa Bagazzano by Egisto Fabbri himself. Any garden is a good place for a conversation, and a Tuscan garden is exceptional—its very essence supports intelligent conversation, which, like gardens themselves, are the bedrock of civility and culture. Welcome to the conversation!
villa di bagazzano
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