GARDENING HISTORY: PATRICK BOWEreviews Paradise of Exiles: The Anglo-American Gardens of FlorenceBy Katie Campbell Frances Lincoln, 176pp. £35
THE AMERICAN writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton were bewitched by the city of Florence, its historical, literary and artistic associations, and its beautiful setting. Hawthorne wrote: “I hardly think there can be a place in the world where life can be more delicious for its own simple sake than here”. Mark Twain praised the view from his rented villa: “After nine months of familiarity with this panorama, I still think, as I thought at the beginning, that this is the fairest picture in our planet . . . ”. American painters such as John Singer Sargent and the Impressionist William Merrit Chase portrayed the scene. English writers such as Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Aldous Huxley and EM Forster joined in the enthusiasm.
Most Anglo-American writers and painters stayed in apartments in the city but the social life of their richer countrymen flourished in the villas of the city's surrounding hills. The contrast between these two kinds of lives is effectively summed up by the Irish writer Nesta de Robeck, in the title of her 1932 book about Florence: Up at a villa, down in the city.
The hillside villas had been used, since Renaissance times, as retreats from the noise and summer heat of the city. The richer members of the Anglo-American community that began to arrive in Florence during the 19th century renovated and lived in many of them. They also revived their gardens, often with an acute eye for historical accuracy. This book, although it is as much about the gossip surrounding these, often eccentric, personalities, focuses on their gardens – 17 of them in all.
Because the Italian renaissance garden had had such an influence on subsequent garden design in the West – see the garden at Powerscourt, Co Wicklow, for example – the Anglo-American community, arriving in Florence, already had strong views of what an Italian garden should be like. They already knew of its characteristic terraces with statuary, fountains and pools, its box parterres, its high clipped hedges, its background of olive groves and tall Italian cypresses.
To these traditional formal elements, they wished to add the floral exuberance of contemporary American and English gardens. This wasn’t easy as the heavy Tuscan soil was not suitable for many of their favourite flowers. Yet, they found roses, peonies, lilies, anemones, wisteria and the scented blue iris, that is the floral symbol of Florence, flourished.
The villa community included art historians, philosophers, writers, a wide range of art patrons and others mainly interested in social life. A central figure in this community was Lady Sybil Cutting, the daughter of Lord Desart of Desart Court in Co Kilkenny. (Her stepmother, of a Viennese Jewish family, was one of the first two women, and the first Jew, to be appointed to the Senate of the Irish Free State.) Lady Sybil, widowed by her American first husband, decided to set up house in Florence. She acquired the Villa Medici, the iconic Renaissance villa that epitomises, through its construction by Cosimo de Medici and its use by his son, Lorenzo, the whole ethos of the Florentine Renaissance. Lady Sybil was determined to re-instate the villa as a centre of artistic and cultural life. She was aided in this by her marriage to Geoffrey Scott, whose book The Architecture of Humanism, was to remain a standard text for generations of architectural students and her subsequent marriage to Percy Lubbock, author of The Craft of Fiction, a book that later became a standard text on creative writing courses. (The Irish poet Richard Webber was to act as Lubbock's secretary later in life)
The Villa Medici having no garden to speak of, Lady Sybil employed one of the heroes of this book, Cecil Pinsent, to design one for her. The gardens of the Anglo-American community in Florence were said to display a combination of Italian classical design, American exuberance and English horticulture. Pinsent, an English architect and garden designer resident in Florence, added a fourth ingredient – a contemporary simplicity. His ability to combine traditional Italian garden design with a labour-saving modernity won him a wide patronage. He was employed first by the scholarly art historian Bernard Berenson, who once described his villa as “a library with a few rooms attached”. In fact, under Pinsent’s direction, it became a splendid villa with an extensive, and now famous, formal garden.
The garden Pinsent designed for Iris Origo, Lady Sybil Cutting’s daughter, is lauded in this book as the garden demonstrating “the best of the Anglo-Florentine tradition”.
Origo is already familiar to many Irish people through her books Images and Shadowsand War in Val d'Orcia. In the former, an autobiographical work, she pays due respect to her Co Kilkenny background with a chapter on her grandparents' house, Desart Court. She and her Italian husband purchased La Foce, a neglected estate south of Siena and improved it to such a picturesque extent that it features today on postcards representing "Real Siena" countryside. The garden she made, with Pinsent's help, around the house has come to be seen as one of the iconic creations of 20th-century garden design.
Of course, there was a certain amount of cultural chauvinism between the Anglo-American community and the Italian community within which it lived. Paradise of Exilesshows how the former often complained about the customs and manners of the Florentines.
On the other hand, the Florentines reciprocated with the memorable rejoinder: " un inglese italianato e il diavolo incarnato". Nonetheless, Paradise of Exilesunderlines how much this Anglo-American community did to re-animate and reinterpret many of Italy's historic gardens. A useful appendix gives details of the gardens that are now open to visitors.
Patrick Bowe’s book on the gardens of the Getty Villa, Malibu, California, is due for publication next year