Italian villas and their gardens /

Abstract

Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904) followed her debut novel, The Valley of Decision (1902). Century magazine commissioned Wharton for a series of six articles on Italian architecture and an accompanying book-length collection. Wharton embarked out of Boston in January 1903, disembarked near Genoa, and proceeded to tour widely — Viterbo up to Orvieto; Siena, Florence, Rome, and Venice — following recommendations from Vernon Lee, the book’s dedicatee, who “better than anyone else, has understood and interpreted the garden-magic of Italy.” The book analyzes more than eighty wonders, intercut with fifty-two illustrations: wide-angle photographs and evocative color compositions by the American painter Maxfield Parrish. It includes familiar landscapes — Villa d’Este and the Boboli Gardens, the Mannerist Medici villa and the abutting Borghese park — enriching architectural history with fine-grain descriptions and fresh impressions. The book remained one of Wharton’s favorite projects. In A Backward Glance, her 1934 autobiography, she writes: “I never enjoyed any work more than the preparing of that book, but neither do I remember any task so associated with physical fatigue.”

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