The garden of the Renaissance villa: a hillside cut into terraces on the axis of the house, joined by stairs and ramps, with water running down from level to level through fountains, cascades and grottoes, clipped evergreens, and a private walled garden by the house.
The Italian garden began as a reading of antiquity. Pliny the Younger had described his villas and their clipped box, and Alberti, in the 1450s, advised that a villa stand on a gentle slope with a view, with porticoes for sun and shade, grottoes, evergreens in rows and box clipped into the owner’s name (The villa garden: porticoes, grottoes, evergreens in rows). The Medici villas round Florence, at Careggi, Fiesole and later Castello, were the first to act on the advice, and Bramante’s Belvedere Court at the Vatican (begun 1505), three terraces joined by stairs on one long axis, gave the type its architecture.
Its typical site is a steep hillside. The slope is cut into level terraces held by retaining walls, the terraces are joined by stairs, often double and curving, and the whole is ordered by an axis that runs from the house down (or up) through the garden (Terraces on the axis of the villa). Water is brought from a spring or a river above the garden and released as it falls: at the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, through hundreds of jets, a water organ and a long wall of fountains; at the Villa Lante at Bagnaia, down a stepped stone channel, the catena d’acqua, to a square water parterre (The water chain). Grottoes, lined with tufa, shells and coloured stones and filled with statues and automata, recall the nymphaea of Roman villas.
The garden had several parts of different character. Near the house lay the giardino segreto, a small walled garden for the owner’s private use, with flowers, fruit trees and herbs (The secret garden). The terraces carried parterres of low clipped hedges in geometric compartments, set with lemon and orange trees in terracotta pots. Beyond them was the bosco, a grove of holm oak or bay, cut by walks, and sometimes a hunting park. The planting was evergreen and architectural: box and myrtle for hedges, cypress in avenues and as single dark verticals, holm oak, laurel and laurustinus clipped into walls, and stone pines for shade. Flowers mattered less than shade, water and stone.
Each great garden had a programme. The Villa d’Este celebrates Hercules, from whom the Este claimed descent, and the waters of the Tivoli hills; the Villa Lante tells the story of the Golden Age giving way to civilisation as the water runs down from a rustic grotto at the top to a formal pool at the bottom. The Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace in Florence, begun by Tribolo in 1549, added an amphitheatre, Buontalenti’s Grotta Grande and, in the seventeenth century, a long cypress avenue down to an island in a pool.
The Italian garden was copied by the French, whose kings had seen it on campaign, and its parts (the axis, the terrace, the water, the clipped green architecture) passed into the French formal garden on flat ground. It was revived in England in the nineteenth century, in Charles Barry’s terraces, and again around 1900, when Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) and the designs of Harold Peto made it a model for the Arts and Crafts garden.