Villa Palmieri is a patrician villa in Fiesole, central Italy, that overlooks Florence. The villa's gardens on slopes below the piazza S. Domenico of Fiesole are credited with being the paradisal setting for the frame story of Boccaccio's Decameron .
The villa was certainly in existence at the end of the 14th century, when it was a possession of the Fini, who sold it in 1454 to the noted humanist scholar Matteo di Marco Palmieri, whose name it still bears. In 1697, Palmiero Palmieri commenced a restructuring of the gardens, sweeping away all vestiges of the earlier garden to create a south-facing terrace, an arcaded loggia of five bays and the symmetrically paired curved stairs (a tenaglia) that lead to the lemon garden in the lower level. The often-photographed lemon garden survives, [1] though postwar renovation stripped the baroque décor from the villa's stuccoed façade. [2]
Boccaccio's description of the villa in Fiesole where his young people retreated from the Black Death raging in Florence to tell stories is too general to identify any one villa securely:
To see this garden, its handsome ordering, the plants, and the fountain with rivulets issuing from it, was so pleasing to each lady and the three young men that all began to affirm that, if Paradise could be made on earth, they couldn't conceive a form other than that of this garden that might be given it. [3]
In 1760, when Florence had developed a considerable English community, the villa was acquired by the 3rd Earl Cowper. [4] Alexandre Dumas, père spent some time there, and collected his Florentine travel essays under the title La Villa Palmieri (Paris, 1843). In 1873 it was purchased by James Ludovic Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford who recreated part of the grounds in the fashionable English naturalistic landscape manner of parkland dotted with specimen trees, but provided also with the exotic tender plants that could not be grown in the open in England. His commissions included also the scenic basin of the Fountain of Three Faces and a little chapel in neo-Baroque manner to one side of the villa.
"Unlike the Gamberaia", Georgina Masson observed, "Villa Palmieri has suffered from having been a 'show-place' and the alterations of many owners to suit the fashions of their day, so that little of its original character remains". [5] Today the oldest remaining parts of Villa Palmieri are the oval geometric garden [6] of lemons which are set out in warm weather ranged round the central circular basin, itself framed in quadrant spandrels, all framed in clipped low boxwood hedging, following an eighteenth-century engraving of this garden space by Giuseppe Zocchi. The upper terrace is supported on the vaults of the limonaia , glazed in the nineteenth century, where the lemon trees were protected from the very occasional hard frost. Some labels on trees record three visits of Queen Victoria to Villa Palmieri, in 1888, 1893 [7] and 1894. [8]
The villa was owned by Chicago industrialist James Ellsworth from 1907 till his death there in 1925. The Villetta, an outbuilding formerly part of the extensive Villa Palmieri grounds, was purchased in 1927 by Myron Taylor, the American ambassador to the Holy see, who recreated a Beaux-Arts version of an Italian terraced garden and named it Villa Schifanoia. [9] The relations of the Villa and the Villetta in an earlier day are represented in the landscape background of Francesco Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin painted for Matteo Palmieri and unfinished at his death in 1475. [10]
Fiesole is a town and comune of the Metropolitan City of Florence in the Italian region of Tuscany, on a scenic height above Florence, 5 km northeast of that city. It has structures dating to Etruscan and Roman times.
Villa La Pietra is a renaissance villa in the hills outside Florence, in Tuscany in central Italy. It was formerly the home of Arthur Acton and later of his son Harold Acton, on whose death in 1994 it was bequeathed to New York University. The villa is now home to NYU Florence.
Settignano is a frazione on a hillside northeast of Florence, Italy. The little borgo of Settignano carries a familiar name for having produced three sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, Desiderio da Settignano and the Gamberini brothers, better known as Bernardo Rossellino and Antonio Rossellino. The young Michelangelo lived with a sculptor and his wife in Settignano—in a farmhouse that is now the "Villa Michelangelo"— where his father owned a marble quarry. In 1511 another sculptor was born there, Bartolomeo Ammannati. The marble quarries of Settignano produced this series of sculptors.
The Villa Medici at Careggi is a patrician villa in the hills near Florence, Tuscany, central Italy.
Villa Le Balze is a garden villa in Fiesole, a comune of the Metropolitan City of Florence and the region of Tuscany in central Italy. The villa was commissioned and built by Charles Augustus Strong in 1913, where he spent much of his life. It was then embroiled in the fighting of the Second World War and came into the possession of Margaret Rockefeller Strong. The villa is today owned by Georgetown University and hosts year-round study abroad students focused on interdisciplinary study of Italian culture and civilization, as well as such other subjects as politics and history.
The Villa Marlia or Villa Reale di Marlia is a late-Renaissance palazzo or villa, and its estate's property that includes renowned gardens and adjacent villas and follies within the compound. It is located in Capannori, in the Province of Lucca, west of Florence, in the northern Tuscany region of Italy.
The Medici villas are a series of rural building complexes in Tuscany which were owned by members of the Medici family between the 15th century and the 17th century. The villas served several functions: they were the country palaces of the Medici, scattered over the territory that they ruled, demonstrating their power and wealth. They were also recreational resorts for the leisure and pleasure of their owners; and, more prosaically, they were the centre of agricultural activities on the surrounding estates. In 2013, the Medici villas were added to UNESCO's World Heritage list.
Peretola is a suburb of Florence, Italy, located on the northern extremity of the Florentine commune. It belongs administratively to Quartiere 5 - Rifredi. It lend its name to the nearby international airport and is claimed as the birthplace of Amerigo Vespucci.
The Villa di Castello, near the hills bordering Florence, Tuscany, central Italy, was the country residence of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1519-1574). The gardens, filled with fountains, statuary, and a grotto, became famous throughout Europe. The villa also housed some of the great art treasures of Florence, including Sandro Botticelli's Renaissance masterpieces The Birth of Venus and Primavera. The gardens of the Villa had a profound influence upon the design of the Italian Renaissance garden and the later French formal garden.
The Villa Torrigiani is located in the hamlet of Camigliano, a town in Capannori (Lucca). It is a historical villa, dating from the second half of the sixteenth century.
Gardens of the French Renaissance were initially inspired by the Italian Renaissance garden, which evolved later into the grander and more formal jardin à la française during the reign of Louis XIV, by the middle of the 17th century.
The Italian Renaissance garden was a new style of garden which emerged in the late 15th century at villas in Rome and Florence, inspired by classical ideals of order and beauty, and intended for the pleasure of the view of the garden and the landscape beyond, for contemplation, and for the enjoyment of the sights, sounds and smells of the garden itself.
Italian garden typically refers to a style of gardens, wherever located, reflecting a number of large Italian Renaissance gardens which have survived in something like their original form. In the history of gardening, during the Renaissance, Italy had the most advanced and admired gardens in Europe, which greatly influenced other countries, especially the French formal garden and Dutch gardens and, mostly through these, gardens in Britain.
George Nassau Clavering-Cowper, 3rd Earl Cowper was an English peer who went on the Grand Tour as a young man, but actually emigrated. Despite becoming a member of parliament and later inheriting lands and the title of Earl Cowper in England, he remained in Italy. He amassed a valuable art collection and became a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. He was a patron of the arts and science.
The Baroque garden was a style of garden based upon symmetry and the principle of imposing order on nature. The style originated in the late-16th century in Italy, in the gardens of the Vatican and the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome and in the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, and then spread to France, where it became known as the jardin à la française or French formal garden. The grandest example is found in the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV. In the 18th century, in imitation of Versailles, very ornate Baroque gardens were built in other parts of Europe, including Germany, Austria, Spain, and in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. In the mid-18th century the style was replaced by the less geometric and more natural English landscape garden.
Villa di Maiano is a 15th-century villa at Via del Saviatino 1 in the Maiano area of Fiesole, near Florence, Italy.
The Villa San Girolamo, sometimes known as the Church of San Girolamo, is building complex that includes a villa, olive grove, and former Catholic monastery and church located on Via Vecchia Fiesolana in Fiesole, Tuscany.