Things to do in Province of Pistoia, Tuscany: The Best Gardens

Reviewed By Brun066 - Florence, Italy

Those who reach the Villa Garzoni Garden without having seen any image before, are struck by the extraordinary glance that it offers as soon as you leave the building now used as a ticket office and look inside. In fact, the flat space, on which the garden could be developed, is limited, therefore the most typical geometric solutions of the Renaissance "Italian garden" can be deployed in a limited space as well. However this flat space is cleverly organized, by the round basins of two large fountains, in which the water sprays are a constitutive part of the architecture. But this isn't a Renaissance garden; it's a baroque one. Moreover, thanks to its very long building period, it denotes by its features an intellectual restlessness that can also make us speak of Enlightenment, or of pre-Romanticism. These more modern styles have driven the extension of the garden on the steep back hill: if the nymphaeum recalls the artificial cave by Bernardo Buontalenti at the Boboli Gardens in Florence (thus giving a taste of late Renaissance), the terraced slope or the hill modeled by the dense vegetation, which leads to the summit and draws the gaze towards it, allows us the comparison (though in miniature) with other more recent and more famous examples of gardens: the names, among others, of the Royal Palace in Caserta and of the Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel, were made. Indeed, among the architects who worked in the garden, or in the nearby villa, Ottaviano Diodati, translator in Italian of the Encyclopédie; or the renowned Filippo Juvarra, are mentioned. Last but not least, the scenographic effect of the garden is enhanced by the clear, almost fairy-like façade of the Villa; behind it the extraordinary, steep row of the Collodi hamlet's ancient houses, peeps in turn.