italian villas and their gardens
Anyone who mistakenly believes that the Internet will replace books will falter when they catch sight of Rizzoli’s glorious reprint of the original 1904 edition of Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens. For a start, the dust jacket background is taken from an exquisite eighteenth-century Italian brocaded damask, with the book’s title embossed discretely in gold. The rest of the book has been carefully reproduced from the original, including the colored plates by Maxfield Parrish. It is a pleasurable object to own, and to read.
Wharton (1862-1937) was one of America’s most  important turn-of-the century writers, and the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Age of Innocence. She was fascinated by design, and produced authoritative works on architecture, landscape gardening and interior design, as well as many great classics of fiction—more than forty books, including The House of Mirth and Ethan Fromme.
John Dixon Hunt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, writes a skillful new introduction to the book, putting Wharton’s text into historical context: ”Its achievement was to review essential elements of Italian practice — the relation of house to garden, and garden to landscape context; the ‘dialogue’ within those spaces of art and nature—and analyse them in ways that enabled their translation into new climates and varied cultures without encouraging merely imitative designs.”
Italian Villas and Their Gardens divides the estates into regional chapters — Wharton tours Villas in Florence, Siena, Rome, Genoa, Lombardy and the Venetia, built mainly by wealthy families, popes and cardinals from the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century.
These include such gems as the Villa Lante, near Viterbo, which was over — documented even in Wharton’s day, “Lante…has been exhaustively sketched and photographed, but so perfect is it, so far does it surpass, in beauty, in preservation, and in the quality of garden-magic, all the other great pleasure-houses of Italy, that the student of garden-craft may always find fresh inspiration in its study.”
She believed that, “the old Italian garden was meant to be lived in—a use to which, at least in America, the modern garden is seldom put.” For the connoisseur, Wharton’s text is full of riches, and is an important reference book for anyone interested in the history of the garden. However, a question naturally arises — how many of these Villas and their gardens remain? For an answer, you might want to buy a companion volume, Edith Wharton's Italian Gardens by Vivian Russell. Nineteen relatively unchanged gardens have been captured by this garden photographer and writer in a series of photographs and historical summaries of each garden, including one of Wharton’s favorites, the Villa Cetinale, with its large park punctuated at one end by a 15th-century gate way and a romitorio, or hermitage, at the other.

Italian Villas and Their Gardens is published in association with The Mount, the Massachusetts estate that Wharton designed and built in 1902 based on the principals she outlined in one of her first books — The Decoration of Houses, and adapting the Italian landscapes she loved so much into the layout of its garden. Sadly, this important historical landscape is under threat of foreclosure, and badly needs donations and support.
You can find out more at www.edithwharton.org. We can help their cause by buying this beautiful and poetic garden book.