Great Italian gardens
Giardino Bardini
Giardino Bardini offers wonderful views of Florence from its 4 hectares of parkland between the left bank of the Arno River, Montecuccoli Hill and the medieval wall.
Originally it was an arrangement of walled orchards near Mozzi Palace covering the whole of the hill behind it.
In the 18th century Giulio Mozzi, who loved gardens, enriched the property with a long fountain wall with a multi-material mosaic at the bottom. In the mid-19th century the baroque garden was enlarged through the purchase of the adjoining Anglo-Chinese garden of Villa Manadora, created by Luigi Le Blanc at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In the second half of the 19th century the Carolath Benten princes acquired the whole property and enriched the garden with Victorian details.
In 1913 the antiquarian Stefano Bardini purchased the complex consisting of Mozzi Palace, the baroque garden and the Anglo-Chinese garden with a remaining agricultural portion and Manadora Villa.
Bardini acted unscrupulously, constructing an avenue to travel by car from the Arno to the villa, destroying the walled gardens of medieval origin, and joining the two existing buildings on Costa San Giorgio.
The death of his son Ugo in 1965 gave rise to a long episode concerning inheritance.
This ended in 1996 thanks to the then minister Paolucci who arranged for the conditions set by the deceased person to be met.
In 2000 the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze (Florence Savings Corporation), acting through the Fondazione Parchi Monumentali Bardini e Peyron (Bardini and Peyron Monumental Parks Foundation), began the restoration of the complex. It took almost five years to restore the garden’s identity and wealth in terms of composition and plants.
In the agricultural park, in which fruit trees in the Tuscan tradition have been planted, there is a circular viewpoint from which one enters a tunnel of wisteria and comes upon no less than 60 varieties of hydrangea.
The baroque flight of steps is the most picturesque part of the garden, with its viewpoint over the city and the six fountains with their multi-material mosaic bottoms.
Bourbon roses and remontant irises have been planted along the flight of steps. In the lowest part there is a garden with herbaceous and graminaceous borders and the grassy theatre that makes use of a cavity in the garden.
In the English-style wood, which formed part of the Anglo-Chinese garden, there is a lawn with azeleas where one can also see ferns, vibernums, camellias, and a collection of citrus fruits. From Via de’ Bardi the route winds up towards the villa, offering views of both the garden and the monuments of Florence.
On reaching Villa Bardini you go out into Costa San Giorgio and in a few minutes you reach the Boboli Garden, from which you can descend back towards the city, covering 7 kilometres altogether amid greenery. It’s possibile to book a personal service at a special price, with a shuttle from 7, 16 or 28 seats, which connects the two Great Italian Gardens of Villa Bardini and Villa Peyron.
Beauty in the human race
He searched for his Japanese birth mother. He found her — and the restaurant she had named after him.
How art history became an academic (& my favorite) field of study
Before Charles Eliot Norton had become Harvard’s first professor of that discipline, art history had, in general, been considered, not a field of study, but a matter of craft and technique to be taught by painters to other painters.
Scholarship about art, and especially about Italian art, entered a new era as the German universities began developing large-scale historical studies like those of Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was published in English in 1878.
In Great Britain, tastes were influenced by the work of Norton’s close friend Ruskin in books like The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) and The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849).
Following Ruskin, Norton loved best in Italy the powerful moral uplift of Dante and of Italy’s medieval Gothic architecture. In Norton’s art history courses, the Renaissance was the unhappy termination of the Middle Ages, which had been the last great era of spiritual unity and well-being.
There was a joke current among Harvard undergraduates that Norton had died and was just being admitted to Heaven, but at his first glimpse staggered backward exclaiming, “Oh! Oh! Oh! So Overdone! So garish! So Renaissance!”
“Norton,” Bernard Berenson commented drily years later, had done what he could at Harvard to restrain “all efforts toward art itself.”
Rachel,Cohen. Bernard Berenson (Jewish Lives) (p. 45). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
British Houses of Parliament are physically rotting away
LONDON
An eccentric masterwork of Victorian genius, its dual chambers for lords and commoners are the living, breathing heart of constitutional monarchy, the home of Parliament, and one of the most photographed buildings in the world.
But Westminster is a wreck, its caretakers say.
The palace is not falling down. Not at all. Its bones, the superstructure, are solid enough, and carrying on, in British fashion, even if its dermis of Yorkshire limestone is spotty.
Giotto, father of Italian Renaissance painting
He must be doing back flips in his grave for the way his name is used and abused in Italy these days!
Italy’s beauty and complications recognized even in wartime
“Trapani! Trapani, don’t you see?” [British] Capt. Edward Croft-Murray exclaimed as the skyline of the Sicilian coastal town first appeared through the porthole of the Allied aircraft. [The Brit] Sitting next to him, Maj. Lionel Fielden, who had been drifting off into daydream for much of the flight from Tunis, opened his eyes to the landscape below. “And there, below us,” Fielden later wrote, “swam through the sea a crescent of sunwashed white houses, lavender hillsides and rust red roofs, and a high campanile whose bells, soft across the water, stole to the mental ear. No country in the world has, for me, the breathtaking beauty of Italy.”
…As soon as the first Monuments Officers reached Sicily, the implications of such a mandate [to preserves as many cultural works as possible] proved as difficult as its scope was vast. The Italian campaign, predicted to be swift by Allied commanders, turned into a 22-month slog. The whole of Italy became a battlefield. In the path of the Allied armies, as troops slowly made their ascent from Sicily to the Alps, lay many beautiful cities, ancient little towns and innumerable masterpieces. As General Mark Clark declared with frustration, fighting in Italy amounted to conducting war “in a goddamn museum.”
Allied forces in Florence
From the safe distance of 2018, it is interesting to think back to the situation in Florence during WWII, especially after the Allied Forces liberated the Renaissance citta’.
The leaders and troops of the Allied Forces are my heroes. There are many to name. General Dwight D. Eisenhower is foremost among them. I recently wrote a post on his directive, which saved many cultural monuments in Italian. Here is a picture of Ike in Italy:
As the Allies liberated region after region in Italy, starting from the southern tip and working their way north, thanks to the farsighted leaders, as many cultural works as were possible were saved.
These wonderful postcards, with their simple illustrations of the Florentine architectural masterpieces, tell a poignant story.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower as protector of cultural heritage
The cumulative weight and momentum of General Marshall’s mid-October admonition about the importance of protecting Italy’s cultural treasures, followed by successive warnings from McCloy and Woolley and the reports of Monuments officers themselves, finally produced a change.
On December 29, General Eisenhower Eisenhower issued a directive that placed the responsibility of protecting cultural property squarely upon the shoulders of every commander and, in turn, every officer and every soldier.
It also, for the first time, introduced the Monuments officers (referenced as “A.M.G. officers”—Allied Military Government) to everyone in uniform. Here is Eisdenhower’s directive:
To: All Commanders Today we are fighting in a country which has contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a country rich in monuments which by their creation helped and now in their old age illustrate the growth of the civilization which is ours. We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows. If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the building must go. But the choice is not always so clear-cut as that. In many cases the monuments can be spared without any detriment to operational needs. Nothing can stand against the argument of military necessity. That is an accepted principle. But the phrase “military necessity” is sometimes used where it would be more truthful to speak of military convenience or even of personal convenience. I do not want it to cloak slackness or indifference. It is a responsibility of higher commanders to determine through A.M.G. Officers the locations of historical monuments whether they be immediately ahead of our front lines or in areas occupied by us. This information passed to lower echelons through normal channels places the responsibility of all Commanders of complying with the spirit of this letter.
signed: DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Ike’s directive was bold; it was concise; and it was now official policy. His Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, issued an accompanying order that provided more specific details on how this new policy should be implemented.
Woolley remarked that Ike’s words “made it clear that the responsibility for the protection of monuments lay with the army as a whole and not with the [Monuments officer] specialist.”
Even Churchill weighed in on the matter: “The weakness of the Monuments and Fine Arts organization in the past was . . . due to the fact that it had . . . depended on an external civilian body not in touch with the Army. . . . The new arrangements which have been worked out in the light of experience are well calculated to promote, as far as military exigencies allow, a more effective effort to protect historical monuments of first importance in the future.”
Many problems lay ahead for implementing this new order. Mistakes would continue. The order would be put to the test in a major way within just six weeks.
But it marked the turning point for the Monuments officers and their work. For the first time since Mason Hammond had landed in Sicily, the Monuments Men had the backing of the Commander-in-Chief. Their work contributed greatly to the experience Eisenhower would take with him to England to plan the invasion of Western Europe as the newly appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force.
Edsel, Robert M.. Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis (p. 68). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
get back, lauretta! 
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