Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Classical Ideals
As early as the 1st century AD (the rough date of the Grotte di Catullo, sited on the head-
land of Sirmione on Lake Garda), the garden landscape played a significant role in classical
culture. Writers such as Ovid, Cicero, Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger set their stor-
ies in fantastical gardens full of grottoes and groves and wrote treatises on agriculture, out-
door dining, summerhouses and the pleasure of aviaries.
For the Romans, a garden was not only a practical place to cultivate vegetables, but also
a place of relaxation and physical well-being. Pliny the Younger is known to have used his
garden at Bellagio as a place of meditation, while Plato used a garden to host his philo-
sophy lessons. Other ruins at Desenzano del Garda reveal an indoor-outdoor colonnaded
peristyle and lavish mosaics, while the Domus dell'Ortaglia, in Brescia, overlooks a grassy
viridarium, a contemplative space lined with fruit trees, laurel hedges and fragrant roses.
In the more cash-strapped Middle Ages, medieval gardeners seemed to lose the pleasure
principle of the Roman
horti
(garden) and focused solely on a protected area or
hortus con-
clusus
(walled garden) for the production of food, fruit and medicinal herbs. Cloisters in
medieval abbeys and churches were often cultivated in this way, and at the Basilica di
Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, the monks allowed humanist scholar Francesco Petrarch
(1304-74) to experiment with growing spinach, beets, fennel and laurels. Petrarch wrote
extensively about these experiments and through his work, among others, the classical
ideals of the garden as an aesthetic place began to be revived.
Italian Villas and Their Gardens
is Pulitzer Prize-winner Edith Wharton's pioneering collection of essays on
Italian gardens. Written during a four-month tour of the country in 1903, it is one of the first books to ex-
plore Italian garden architecture and it influenced a generation of landscape architects.
