The Italian Garden: Art, Design & Culture (Cambridge Studies In Italian History & Culture)

"...this collection of essays constitutes a welcome contribution to the fields of garden history and Italian studies. If one sign of good scholarship is that it both answers questions and opens doors to new ones, this collection is an outstanding example. It piques the reader's interest, provides glimpses into landscapes heretofore neglected and suggests new pathways for research and discovery." Dianne Harris, Journal of the Society of Architectural History"The Italian Garden is a beneficial addition to the list of books about Italy and its protracted garden tradition." Philip Pregill, Landscape Journal

Italian gardens vary widely according to their historical date and geographic location. This collection approaches Italian gardens of all periods, from the middle ages to modern times, and it ranges widely throughout the peninsula, from Genoa to Sicily, the Veneto to Liguria, and Ferrara to Florence. The authors are a distinguished group of Italian, American, English and German scholars, with different backgrounds in Art History, literature, architecture, planning, and cultural history. The explorations of the subject from these different perspectives illuminate not only their own disciplines, but are concerned to make many fresh connections between garden art and the politics of nationalism, between the art of gardens and urban infrastructure, between cultural movements like freemasonry and site planning, between design and planting materials. The book offers therefore a narrative of the garden by selecting ten high points of its history, which are introduced with a consideration by the volume editor of the fresh challenges to contemporary Italian garden history.

This volume of interdisciplinary essays explores the history and the diversity of the Italian garden from medieval times to the modern period, showing how different types of garden developed throughout the peninsula, depending on climate, situation and culture.

Until the late nineteenth century Italy was a collection of different states, each of which developed its own kind of garden, subject to climate, situation and culture. Italian Renaissance gardens were the admiration of Europe and North America. Italian designers revived the classical art of garden-making, drawing also upon medieval literary traditions; but they also developed their own forms and styles, even when they began to borrow back ideas of landscape gardening from England in the late eighteenth century. This collection explores the history of the Italian garden, making interesting connections between garden art and design and the politics of nationalism, the urban infrastructure and cultural movements.

A collection of ten interdisciplinary essays on the history and diversity of the Italian garden.