Edith Wharton's lifelong love affair with Italy began at the age of four, when her parents took her to Rome for a year. She loved Italian art, landscape and architecture, spoke the language fluently and was a prodigious reader of Italian poetry and literature. But it was her American pioneering spirit which rose to meet the challenge offered by 'Century Magazine' to write a series of articles to accompany a set of paintings of Italian villas and gardens by Maxfield Parrish. She collected her household together, and husband, housekeeper and small dogs all set off on a four-month exploration of Italy. Her articles were published in 1904 as 'Italian Villas And Their Gardens'. One of the first books to treat the subject of Italian garden architecture seriously, it became a groundbreaking work.
Nearly one hundred years later Vivian Russell set out on her own odyssey, following Edith Wharton's footsteps around Italy to photograph the best surviving gardens from her book and to tell the story of how and why each one was made. Her lively text describes the patrons and architects who created the gardens and explores their hidden symbolic meaning.
Superb photographs brilliantly capture the atmosphere of the gardens in winter and summer.
