Italian garden

“ Our midsummer skies are almost as deep, our foliage is as rich, and perhaps more varied; there are, indeed, not a few resemblances between the North American summer climate and that of Italy in spring and autumn.
Some of those who have fallen under the spell are inclined to ascribe the Italian garden-magic to the effect of time; but, wonder-working as this undoubtedly is, it leaves many beauties unaccounted for. To seek the answer one must go deeper: the garden must be studied in relation to the house, and both in relation to the landscape. ”

“ The Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore, and the Borghese Garden at Rome, are fair types. And as I recall the sunny vistas of this last, and the noontide loungings upon the marble seats, counting white flecks of statues amid the green of cypresses, and watching the shadow which some dense-topped pine flings upon a marble flight of steps or a marble balustrade, I cannot sneer at the Italian gardening, or wish it were other than it is. The art-life of Italy is the crowning and the overlapping life. ”

“ It is not easy to conceive any thing more entertaining, to a man of taste, than an Italian Garden; in which, amidst a profusion of pleasing objects, the same elegance of choice, the same elevation of style so conspicuous in the sculpture and painting of the great Italian schools, is every where prevalent. ”

“ The Italian Garden—opposite the library windows, with its richly colored parterres, and its clustered foliage wreathed around the pillars which support the statues and busts scattered among them, and hanging from one to the other with a luxurious verdure which seems to belong to the south—is a relief to the eye sated with the splendors of the palatial edifice. ”

“ I recall particularly two Italian gardens, perfectly laid out by landscape gardeners, but which amounted to nothing because the planting was insufficient,—here a Phlox, there a Lily, then a Rose, with perhaps a Larkspur or a Marigold, all rigidly set out in single plants far apart, with nothing in masses, and no colour effects.
To attain success in growth, as well as in effect, plants must be so closely set that when they are developed no ground is to be seen. If so placed, their foliage shades the earth, and moisture is retained. ”

“ For the landscape surrounding the Borromean Islands has precisely that quality of artificiality, of exquisitely skilful arrangement and manipulation, which seems to justify, in the garden-architect, almost any excesses of the fancy. The Roman landscape, grandiose and ample, seems an unaltered part of nature; so do the subtly modelled hills and valleys of central Italy: all these scenes have the deficiencies, the repetitions, the meannesses and profusions, with which nature throws her great masses on the canvas of the world ”

“ THE CASCADE, VILLA TORLONIA, FRASCATI
11Then, again, any one who studies the old Italian gardens will be struck with the way in which the architect broadened and simplified his plan if it faced a grandiose landscape. Intricacy of detail, complicated groupings of terraces, fountains, labyrinths and porticoes, are found in sites where there is no great sweep of landscape attuning the eye to larger impressions. The farther north one goes, the less grand the landscape becomes and the more elaborate the garden. ”

“ It is safe to say that no one enters the grounds of the Villa Medici without being soothed and charmed by that garden-magic which is the peculiar quality of some of the old Italian pleasances. It is not necessary to be a student of garden-architecture to feel the spell of quiet and serenity which falls on one at the very gateway ”

“ In all Italian garden-architecture there is nothing quite comparable for charm and delicately reminiscent classicalism with this grotto-bath of Pope Julius’s villa. Here we find the tradition of the old Roman villa-architecture, as it had been lovingly studied in the letters of Pliny, transposed into Renaissance forms, with the sense of its continued fitness to unchanged conditions of climate and a conscious return to the splendour of the old patrician life. ”

“ I am on firm ground in rejoicing in the little garden directly opposite our windows—it is another proof that they really show us everything—and in feeling that the gardens of Venice would deserve a page to themselves. They are infinitely more numerous than the arriving stranger can suppose; they nestle with a charm all their own in the complications of most back-views. Some of them are exquisite, many are large, and even the scrappiest have an artful understanding, in the interest of colour, with the waterways that edge their foundations. ”

“ From the garden-student’s point of view, there is nothing in Lombardy as important as the Isola Bella. In these rich Northern provinces, as in the environs of Florence, the old gardens have suffered from the affluence of their owners, and scarcely any have been allowed to retain their original outline. The enthusiasm for the English garden swept over Lombardy like a tidal wave, obliterating terraces and grottoes, substituting winding paths for pleached alleys, and transforming level box-parterres into rolling lawns which turn as brown as door-mats under the scorching Lombard sun. ”

“ The upper terrace preserves traces of its formal parterres and box-hedges. Thence flights of steps lead down to a long bowling-green between hedges, like that at the Gamberaia. A farther descent reveals another terrace-garden, with clipped hedges, statues and fountains; and thence sloping alleys radiate down to stone-edged pools with reclining river-gods in the mysterious shade of the ilex-groves. Statues are everywhere: in the upper gardens, nymphs, satyrs, shepherds, and the cheerful fauna of the open pleasance ”

“ Even the opposite hillside must have been included in the original scheme of this vast garden, for it still shows, on the central axis between the pavilions, a tapis vert between cypresses, doubtless intended to lead up to some great stone Hercules under a crowning arch.
But it is not the size of the Campi gardens which makes them so remarkable; it is the subtle beauty of their planning, to which time and neglect have added the requisite touch of poetry. ”

“ It is the glory of the Italian garden-architects that neglect and disintegration cannot wholly mar the 176effects they were skilled in creating: effects due to such a fine sense of proportion, to so exquisite a perception of the relation between architecture and landscape, between verdure and marble, that while a trace of their plan remains one feels the spell of the whole. ”

“ The scheme of the garden is worthy of careful study, though in many respects the effect it now produces is far less impressive than its designers intended. Probably 26no grounds of equal grandeur and extent have less of that peculiar magic which one associates with the old Italian garden—a fact doubtless due less to defects of composition than to later changes in the details of planting and decoration. ”

“ The gardens of the Villa Albani seem to have been decorated by an archæologist rather than an artist. It is interesting to note that antique sculpture, when boldly combined with a living art, is one of the most valuable adjuncts of the Italian garden; whereas, set in an artificial evocation of its own past, it loses all its vitality and becomes as lifeless as its background. ”

“ Excellent roads kept in excellent repair honeycomb the plain, while aqueducts, temples, [Pg 73] trees, shrines, monuments, and statues rejoice the eye and enliven the journey. Villa, dependents' dwellings, the mausoleum, the farms, are seen a long way off in this flat land, and not the least curious feature as the traveller approaches is the formal garden still known to us as "an Italian garden," an entirely artificial creation where each tree and shrub has not only its prescribed place in the scheme, but its prescribed form, giving the impression of a continuous trained English box hedge. ”

“ It is a common thing in Italian gardens to see a quantity of plants in pots standing in various parts of the garden, generally in connexion with paved terraces and steps. This is in addition to the larger pot plants—Oranges, Lemons, Oleanders, &c., that, in their immense and often richly decorated earthenware receptacles, form an important part of the garden design. In our climate we cannot have these unless there is an Orangery or some such spacious place free from frost for housing them in winter. ”

“ In some of the great French gardens, at Vaux and Versailles for example, one is conscious, under all the beauty, of the immense effort expended, of the vast upheavals of earth, the forced creating of effects; but it was the great gift of the Italian gardener to see the natural advantages of his incomparable landscape, and to fit them into his scheme with an art which concealed itself. ”

“ The ancient practice of cutting box-trees into fantastic shapes, known to the Romans as the topiary art, was largely restored in the Fifteenth Century and became an essential part of Italian gardens. In that strange romance printed at the Aldine Press in 1499, the Hypernotomachia [Pg 16] of Francesco Colonna, Polyphilus and his beloved are led through an enchanted garden where banquet-houses, temples and statues stand in the midst of myrtle groves and labyrinths on the banks of a shining stream. ”

“ Parterres of rare exotics, and large majolica vases filled with flowers, occupy the grand space. At the corners and in other parts are life-sized statues: mirrors and [1217] other appliances add to the beauty of the whole. The south side opens to the Billiard, Morning, and Withdrawing Rooms. Aviaries of singing-birds are placed at intervals throughout the garden, and in the corridor leading to the Palm-house are a fern-grotto and fountain. The whole, it should be specially noted, may be lit with gas.
From the Winter Garden the visitor is shown the Italian Garden, opposite the west front. ”

“ There are few gardens in Italy comparable with Val San Zibio; but in Padua there is one of another sort which has kept something of the same ancient savor. This is the famous Botanic Garden, founded in 1545, and said to be the oldest in Italy. The accompanying 240plan, though roughly sketched from memory, will give some idea of its arrangement. Outside is a grove of exotic trees, which surrounds a large circular space enclosed in a beautiful old brick wall surmounted by a marble balustrade and adorned alternately with busts and statues. ”

“ It looks on a terrace enclosed by a balustrade, whence a broad flight of steps descends to the gently sloping gardens. They are remarkable for their long pleached alleys of beech, their wide tapis verts, fountains, marble benches and statues charmingly placed in niches of clipped verdure. In one direction is a little lake, in another a “mount” crowned by a statue, while a long alley leads to a well-preserved maze with a raised platform in its centre. These labyrinths are now rarely found in Italian gardens, and were probably never as popular south of the Alps as in Holland and England. ”

“ The towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in spite of Signor P——, a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather. The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. ”

“ When times grew more peaceful, men became more trustful, ventured forth, enjoyed the pleasures of a country life, and gardening prospered. In monasteries especially, the art received attention; but it was not until the beginning of the 16th century that a decided advance was manifest, and then we have to note a return to the style of gardening that flourished in ancient Rome itself. Lorenzo de’ Medici possessed a garden laid out in the revived classical manner, and this style, which is recognised as the Italian, has existed in Italy with certain modifications ever since. ”

“ No one who has seen an Italian garden, so arranged, can dispute the beauty of it. It may be suggested that in England it would be difficult to protect the terra-cotta from cracking in frosty weather. Experience in southern counties has been favourable, and should it not be so in colder places, they can be put under cover for the winter months. ”

“ The small seventeenth-century house, with its adjoining chapel and outbuildings, lies directly on the public road, and forms the boundary of its own grounds. The charming garden-façade, with its voluted sky-line, and the two-storied open loggia forming the central motive of the elevation, faces on a terrace-like open space, bounded by a wall, and now irregularly planted à l’Anglaise, but doubtless once the site of the old flower-garden. ”

“ Everything in these gardens is artificial in the extreme, and in set opposition to the wild luxuriance of nature; and although the trees and shrubs are planted with a great regard to precision, they are too frequently devoid of all artistic effect. During the last century, the Italian style became blended with English landscape-gardening, but without much success; for the formality of the original style clings to all Italian gardening at the present day. ”

“ This is a rare feature in Italian grounds: in hilly Italy there was small need of creating the artificial hillocks so much esteemed in the old English gardens. In this case, however, the mount justifies its existence, for it affords a wonderful view over the other side of Rome and the Campagna.
Finally, the general impression of the Medici garden resolves itself into a sense of fitness, of perfect harmony between the material at hand and the use made of it. The architect has used his opportunities to the utmost; but he has adapted nature without distorting it. ”

“ Italian gardens, though generally planned to give one imposing spectacle of some kind, with great wealth of statues and marble balustrades and elaborate formations or quiet stretches of water, are rich in small sequestered courts of flowers and greenery; the people who seem to have cared least for privacy in their houses took pains to make many solitudes in their gardens. ”