Italian Gardens

Italian Gardens are a formal style developed during the Renaissance, with strong axial symmetry, terraces, water features and clipped evergreens. Articles look at the Villa d’Este at Tivoli with its hundred fountains, the Boboli behind the Pitti Palace in Florence, the Villa Lante at Bagnaia, the Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore, and the smaller giardini segreti tucked behind palaces in Rome and Genoa. There are also notes on the difference between the Italian style and the later French formal garden, on the use of stone pine and cypress, and on what the modern restoration projects had to recover from centuries of neglect.