Villa I
Tatti
The Edwardian garden
designer Cecil Pinsent had the good fortune to find a wealthy and
influential patron when he was still in his early twenties. He was taken up by the American art historian
Bernard Berenson who asked him to create a garden at
I
Tatti, his villa just outside Florence. Berenson himself was a
protégé of the art collector, Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston, one of the group of rich, leisured Americans who adopted Italy as their cultural home and who gave Henry James such a rich seam to mine in his novels.
The Green Garden at I Tatti was Pinsent's first attempt to recreate a garden in the early Renaissance style. His biggest problem was the steepness of the site and his solution was the classic Italian one: terraces that dropped down the slope with short flights of steps connecting each level.
I Tatti now belongs to Harvard University and houses its Renaissance research
institute.
Geoffrey Scott, Berenson's secretary
and librarian, shared a flat with Pinsent at the top of an old palazzo in the Via delle Terme
in Florence. Geoffrey Scott later married the widowed Lady Sybil Cutting, mother
of Iris Origo and owner of Villa Medici at Fiesole. After the termination of
this unlikely marriage, Lady Cutting married the essayist Percy Lubbock and
lived with him at Gli Scafari on the Gulf of Spezia. Through this connection, Pinsent later worked for
many years on Iris Origo's villa and garden at La Foce - see below.
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Villa Le Balze
Pinsent started work at
Villa Le Balze
in 1911 and his client was another
artistic American, the philosopher Charles Augustus Strong. Here, he had to work on a site that was even steeper and narrower than the garden at I Tatti. The entrance is wonderfully unassuming: a door in a curtain wall that brings you into the first of a series of small green rooms: lemons in pots, tall hedges of
holm oak, box edged beds, iris, lavender, swags of rose. Pinsent made a classic grotto, decorated with pebble mosaics and four medallion busts.
From its location near Fiesole,
there are stunning views back down onto the city with the soft brown roof of the Duomo dominating the
scene.
Villa Le Balze now belongs to Georgetown University.
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Villa
Capponi
The
garden of Villa Capponi, included in the surveys of Edith Wharton and
Geoffrey Jellicoe, dates from the seventeenth century. It was extended by Lady
Elizabeth Scott after 1882 and by Cecil Pinsent after 1939. The villa, built in the 14th century, was purchased in 1572 by the Capponi family which extended it and enhanced it, turning it into a noble residence. In 1882 it became the property of Lady Scott, daughter of the Duke of Portland, and later passed into the hands of the Clifford family. The building, which is quite simple in layout, was further embellished at the end of the 19th century with the additions of two panoramic loggias, the columns for which were, it seems, taken from demolition work done during the redevelopment of the old city centre to create Piazza della
Repubblica. The garden, which comprises terraces on different levels, extends along the Pian dei Giullari hillside, from where the view over Florence is quite breathtaking, and blends in with the surrounding farmland. The first terrace, immediately behind the villa, is a broad grassy area stretching the length of the northern side of the building, on which an ancient wisteria hangs. To the east, on the same level, is the entrance to a delightful secret garden, rectangular in layout and edged in box hedges. Access to this formal garden, separated from the lawn by another box hedge, is marked by two columns surmounted by two terracotta griffins. To the west, on different levels, are another two secret gardens with box-edged parterres and surrounded by high walls with elegantly curving crenellations and earthenware urns. The first of these gardens, which lies five metres lower than the level of the villa, is reached by a narrow flight of steps beside the boundary wall. A wrought-iron gate leads to the second garden, at the centre of which stands a fine stone lily-pool. The recently-built rectangular swimming pool lower down is surrounded by tall rows of cypresses.
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