Italian Gardens with Monty Don | Florence

I'm on the second leg of my trip around Italy, exploring the country's loveliest and most influential gardens, and the ideas, landscape and history that shape them. I began my journey with the Grand Gardens of Rome, made by cardinals vying for the papacy. I'm heading south to Naples, where the sun has inspired gardens of poetry and romance. That's just lovely. And right up to the north of the country, where the gardens are magnificently dramatic. I am actually genuinely lost. This time I'm in Florence, where the creative flowering we now know as the Renaissance promoted for the first time in modern history the idea that a garden could be a work of art. In every direction you see balance, order and harmony. I'll be visiting both public and private gardens in order to find out what it is about them that still has such a powerful resonance with us today. It does feel like the most extraordinary dramatic gesture to have at the bottom of the garden. I'll also discover how British and American garden makers reinvented Renaissance gardens at the beginning of the 20th century, spreading the myth that they were always a flower-free zone. It's all the same colour and yet building this symphony of green. In the 15th century, the Tuscan city-state of Florence became the artistic and intellectual centre of the Renaissance, which was a profound artistic and cultural revolution that over two centuries took medieval Europe into the modern era. Florentine artists like Botticelli, Michelangelo and Leonardo, and architects such as Brunelleschi and Vasari produced some of the most glorious art and architecture the world has ever seen. The Renaissance also developed the concept that had lain dormant since classical times, that a garden, just as much as a painting or a piece of sculpture, could also be a profound artistic expression. In the 15th century there was this extraordinary flowering of art and science and literature and from that came this idea that gardens could be places that were beautiful in their own right, that expressed power and pleasure, as well as just utilitarianism, and it does seem to me extraordinary that 500 years later we're still finding those gardens have something in them that is deeply attractive to us, and if you want to discover what that is and what Renaissance gardens were all about, then you need to come here, to Florence. The gardens in and around Florence are among the most beautiful anywhere in the world. Whilst they were all created as works of art, they were also deliberate expressions of power, wealth and learning. And the gardens made during this period inspired a 20th century Renaissance revival, was taken up enthusiastically by the expat community in Florence and then by the rest of the world. The Renaissance, which was a new synthesis of literature, art, science and philosophy, was nurtured and financed by Florence's ruling banking dynasty, the Medici. The development of the printing press led to the spread of ancient texts that in turn inspired artists and philosophers with ideas rediscovered from ancient Greece and Rome. At the same time, the Medici were growing ever richer as the Pope's banker, and they fostered a creative home for the greatest artists, thinkers and architects of the day. I'm heading now to the outskirts of Florence and the earliest surviving Medici garden, Villa Castello. The garden at Villa Castello was begun in 1537, in the later or high Renaissance, and has been restored to pretty much its original condition. The thing that strikes you immediately when you walk in is the symmetry. Everything is balanced. Whatever happens on one side is picked up on the other side. And the result is harmonious and you can feel it. You can feel this sense of lightness, of generosity that is completely prepared and ordered and laid out. And you might think that that would be dull and predictable, but actually it's not. Villa Castello was the home of Cosimo de' Demici, who became head of state after the murder of his relation, Alessandro, at the age of just 17. Cosimo was an austere and ruthless man, but under his rule, the glory of the Medicis and Florence reached new heights. However, in 1537, he was hardly more than a boy, and Florence was in a state of turmoil. Yet one of his first acts was to commission these magnificent gardens, attached then to a relatively modest villa. To understand why Cosimo would stake so much on a garden, I met Giorgio Galletti, a Renaissance expert who oversaw the superb restoration of these gardens. Why was this garden made at that time? What was the impetus to do it? You have to think that this had also a symbolic meaning. The layout is a kind of symbol of this new order after 30 years of confusion, of fights, of bad economic conditions. They call it Buon Governo, this good government. The Medicis really are the only ones who can provide prosperity and happiness to Tuscany. In what way does it exemplify the high Renaissance garden? I think the layout. It was divided in 16 compartments in perfect geometric shape. It was a demonstration of perfect control of man, of space and nature. And also, it was the first time that an axis is used from the grotto to the villa by two fountains. The main perspective. This was something new. So Cosimo commissioned the sculptor Niccolò Tribbo to make a garden that would be a display of his sophistication and power, that he could then show to visiting rulers and ambassadors as a clear demonstration of his wise and strong government. This aspect of a garden, being deliberately intended as a parade of cultured power, was a development new to the high Renaissance. But the layout and the way the design maximises the views of the surrounding countryside are based upon well-established precedents of garden design. The garden didn't come out of nothing. It was following a set of rules. They were best expressed by a man called Alberti. Now, he was a philosopher and a theorist. And he said, quite specifically, that gardens should have certain features. There should be paths, there's symmetry. There should be flowing streams. There should be trees planted. And they should be planted in the form of a quincunx. Now, a quincunx is where you have, and I can show you this really easily. It's where you have your trees planted in a row like that, and then you have another matching set. And then you plant one in the middle. And what it means is as your pattern builds up like that, you have that direction, you can have them in this direction, you can have them in that direction. And you can see this really clearly here. So down there you can see a line of trees along. Here you can see a line of trees along this axis is a line of trees. And the whole point of that is in every direction you see balance, order, and harmony. Renaissance thinkers were exploring classical scientific principles. And one of the beliefs was that God created the world along mathematical lines. Thus, the symmetry of Costello's language was a deliberate echo of the universe's own order design. One of the great discoveries of the Renaissance were the rules of perspective, where you have a vanishing point where two parallel lines meet. And, of course, where two lines meet at a viewpoint, at a sculpture or a niche, then that draws you to it. And it's as though they're relishing this new discovery. It seems to me that sums up the whole Renaissance spirit because you have science, you have mathematics, you have art, and you have humanity, the human point of view, all working together. There is a modern assumption that the Italian gardens of the Renaissance were dominated by a single colour, green. Yet Costello is, and was from the very first, full of flowers. But when Giorgio Galetti started the restoration work, nearly all the original plants were long dead. So he had to do a great deal of detective work to find out what grew here 500 years ago. From my research, I realised that in the Parterre there were dwarf fruit trees, and we start to reintroduce these dwarf fruit trees. And also there were flowers, and particularly herbaceous, because they could flower in summer. The picture you're painting is much more complex and interesting. There were more than 600 bushes of roses. Jasmine, Grand Duke of Tuscany was collected here. So this idea that Italian gardens are just green, with statues and water features, is at best incomplete and actually a myth, really. Yes, it's a stereotype, yeah. So it just isn't true that Renaissance gardens were simply a formal green geometry. Villa Costello, like every other Italian garden of the period, was richly floriferous. And with the discovery of new worlds, new species were starting to come into Italy, instigating a great resurgence in the science of botany. Giorgio has found letters from Cosimo, revealing his own personal passion for roses, jasmine and citrus. In fact, some of the 130 different varieties of citrus in today's garden were propagated from Cosimo's original plants. You as a man, not just with the money and the power to collect interesting, expensive things, but a learned man, applying that knowledge to botanical and horticultural affairs. And I think that's really telling about the whole Renaissance spirit. Every account of Cosimo describes him as an exceptionally remote figure, with a penchant for extreme violence. But the respect he demanded as a ruler depended as much on the evidence of his learning and culture as his ruthlessness. To this extent, the garden was all part of his control of the state. When the visitor came up here into the grotto, the first thing they would have appreciated was the cool. There would have been water everywhere. Water in these enormous basins and from the floor and running down the walls. But they would also have seen these animals, the extraordinary great menagerie of animals. So you have here things like the dromedary, which refers back to Lorenzo the Magnificent, who was given one by the king of Egypt. You have the goat, because Cosimo's star sign was Capricorn. Up here there's a rhinoceros, and that refers to Alessandra, Cosimo's predecessor, who was a tyrant, killed people. And this is all about Medici power. Some of it positive, some of it benign, but power. The garden at Villa Castello was one of the first and most influential of the great wave of Italian garden building that took place in the second half of the 16th century. And its superb restoration means that it's the nearest thing to a true Renaissance garden that exists in Italy today. When I first came to the garden, I thought it would be formal and symmetrical, but perhaps a little bit austere and even empty in places, and it absolutely is not like that at all. And that very interesting point that Giorgio made, that it's a myth that Italian gardens didn't have flowers in it. This garden would certainly have had plants of every kind, and in fact, if you want to see a Renaissance garden as near to the real thing as you possibly could, then this is it. Castello was the first garden Cosimo made, but not the last. Whereas that had been a private show of his public power, in 1550, when he was still just 29, work began on a garden that would dwarf Castello, which was to be a much more public display of his private passions. Whilst work was still underway at Castello, Cosimo started another garden. Now, this time, it was right in the middle of Florence, it was much bigger, and it was different in a number of ways, not least that it was intended from the outset to house and display his huge collection of sculpture. The traditional seat of Florentine rulers was the Palazzo Vecchio, in the centre of the city, but in 1549, Cosimo's wife, Eleonora of Toledo, bought the Pitti Palace, just across the river, and rebuilt it on an enormous scale. It's not normally open to the public, but I've been given special permission to take the elevated corridor that Cosimo had made in 1564, linking the Pitti Palace to the newly built Uffizi, just so he could walk privately across the river, secure from, and unseen by, the jostling crowds on the bridge below. Today, the walls are lined with the Medici family's private collection of self-portraits by some of the world's most renowned artists. To just walk along and just see a Rembrandt, a Rembrandt in old age, that's worth coming here to see that. At the end of the corridor, a door opens into the most ambitious of all the Medici homes, the Boboli Gardens. Throughout the medieval period, sculpture had been primarily displayed in churches. But now, as Renaissance artists drew inspiration from classical statues that openly relished the human form, sculpture began to be displayed in Florence's gardens and piazzas. One of the most opulent displays of sculpture in the Boboli Gardens is the Grotto, designed in 1582 by the Florentine architect Bernardo Buontolenti for Cosimo's son, Francesco. In its heyday, the Grotto's marble sculptures and walls of volcanic rock, shells and quartz, would have shimmered beneath cascades and jets of water. In the corners are these four sculptures. Now, these are concrete casts, but until the 1920s, they were the originals, and they're by Michelangelo, the slaves. And I remember being taught about these extraordinary sculptures that showed the slave trying to break free from the stone that they're imprisoned in. And then much later, they came here as a gift. Of course, Michelangelo, one of the greatest figures in the history of art and of the Renaissance and of the Medici family. So it's all here in the one place. The Boboli Gardens continued to be made and remade for over two centuries, getting ever bigger and grander until eventually it covered 111 acres. Initially, the steep rocky land behind the palace was leveled to make an open grassy space flanked by trees where Cosimo could indulge his mania for hunting. Then, some 50 years after his death, his descendants took this modest amphitheatre and enlarged it hugely to accommodate the new theatrical Baroque fashion. There was a mania for performance of any kind, pageants but less, mass, and the bigger the better because it meant that you had lots of money to spend. They cost a fortune and they would build volcanoes that exploded and have wild animals. They flooded an area at one time and had a battle with boats. It was a kind of elaborate theatre to entertain your guests who would sit around and they would take in the space and the garden became the setting for the most dramatic performance possible. I met the director of the city's museums, Cristina Agidini, to find out more about Boboli's grand mass and pageants. It does seem that there was a big change in style when Cosimo went from Castello to Boboli. What instigated that? The garden is more and more the setting of public events that were recorded, admired, and spoken about all over Europe. We have wonderful statements from the Venetian ambassadors that were very careful and exact in their reports and they were describing magnificent festivals. Was this a new development that gardens could tell these stories? Yes, it is a significant watershed in the history of gardening. There were political meanings in them. The gardens is part of a propaganda expanded programme. What instigated that? What prompted it? That the Medici and especially Cosimo were the rulers of Florence and they were keeping peace thanks to their power. So people should support power and in return they get peace? That's, yes, more or less that. That's the meaning of it. So the grand pageants were displays of Medici power with the clear message that power equals peace and economic stability for the people of Florence, but only if they fell in line behind Medici rule. Boboli was private until the 19th century when it was open to the public, but some parts are still out of bounds, like the Isolotto, an oval island made in the 1620s surrounded by a broad moat. The public aren't allowed on this island, but I've been letting it as a treat. It's clearly seen better days. It's still rather wonderful and it did have a different origin completely. It was a rabbit island. You'd keep rabbits and chickens on the island, perhaps there would be an aviary as well, and it'd be protected by a moat of water and in that you'd have fish, so you'd have plenty of dinner stored at the bottom of the garden. And then when they bought the obelisk and put that in the amphitheatre, they moved this, which was already there. So this is the original decoration and you can see the enormity of the scale would have fitted into that space. Here, well, here, it's very strange, isn't it? I'll tell you what I like about this. It does feel like the most extraordinary dramatic gesture to have at the bottom of the garden. A bit scrappy, feels a bit unloved, but it is an amazing piece of garden theatre. The Medici dynasty ruled Florence for more than three centuries and were the greatest patrons of the Renaissance. They'd also been instrumental in establishing the concept that a garden could be a work of art, as well as playing an important role in confirming their wealth and power. I'm off to a shop in the back streets to sample one of the more unlikely spinoffs from Boboli Gardens' Grand Grotto. As well as designing the grotto, Bernardo Buontalenti built the Medici ice houses where ice for chilling food was stored. And according to Florentine legend, when he experimentally chilled a cream-based dessert, he invented ice cream. To the subsequent delight of the grateful world. Now, this is the original ice cream, isn't it? It was made by the Medici? Yes, Bernardo Buontalenti. What are the ingredients? Cream, milk, honey, sugar, spices. Can I have a taste of it? Of course, yes. Then that will take me back to that first ice cream, thank you. It's very good, it's very custody, isn't it? Can I have a little container of that, please? Thank you. The next stage of my journey will take me and the Renaissance rule book right into the 20th century. Of course, now with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that by 1600, the Renaissance had evolved into something much more theatrical that typified the Baroque. However, the values of order and elegance remained. And in one garden in particular, this combination was to prove enormously influential. Settignano is a village in the hills overlooking Florence, famed for its stone cutters and where Michelangelo grew up. It's also home to a small private garden called Villa Gamberaia. Gamberaia is a three-acre garden built on top of a ridge by Andrea di Lampe, a wealthy silk merchant between 1619 and 1680. Although its creation came 150 years after Alberti wrote his Renaissance garden formula and is very much a Baroque garden, Gamberaia still holds true to Alberti's basic rules of order, symmetry and a clear relationship with the Tuscan landscape around it. Running the whole length of one side of the garden is the bowling green. One end is an infam and 300 full and perfectly flat green yards distant, a pine-fringed balustraded view over the Tuscan countryside. I think this bowling green is one of the great pieces of garden design. Apart from everything else, it's an outrageously ambitious thing to do. This enormous great length made out of grass and a climate where you can't really grow grass, so they've had to bring in water especially for it. And then building these walls, some of which are retaining walls because they're sliced into the hillside, so that the whole thing is monumental in scale in a relatively small garden and yet it doesn't upset the balance of the garden. Gamberaia was admired from its creation but it was only at the turn of the 20th century that it would come to act as a kind of muse to a new generation of garden designers as the idealised version of what a Tuscan villa might be. In 1896, Villa Gamberaia was bought by a Romanian princess, the exotic and reclusive Princess Ghica, who settled here with an American woman rumoured to be her lover. She married this Albanian prince who was a bit of an adventurer and certainly never appeared here at Gambera and Princess Ghica's affections were directed towards her female companion who was wonderfully called Florence Blood. Princess Ghica apparently was a great beauty but her looks went and she never appeared in public without a veil. In fact, she hardly ever appeared in public at all and people would just get glimpses of her through the window but the one thing she was, was obsessed by this garden. By the end of the 19th century, the formal parterre had become a vegetable plot and the princess embarked on a major restoration and remodelling of the garden. To get an idea of the extent of her impact, I met up with Mario Bevilacqua, Professor of Architecture at the University of Florence and an expert on the garden's history. This map is what we call a cabreo, the lambsurvey of the Gamberaia. It can be dated to the beginning of the 18th century. It's a very important document because it gives a true representation of what the property looked like. The agricultural fields and the gardens, the layout of the gardens and the villa itself. Were people concerned that she was going to ruin a historical? Absolutely not. I mean, she was not ruining anything. She was enhancing the property and she was restoring it to its former beauty and she knew how it was, but then she wanted to recreate something which could convey a stronger idea of an idealised Italian formal garden. This is what she did out here. From the loggia, the garden is laid out perfectly below us. Princess Ghica kept the symmetry of the original 17th century layout, but replaced the ornate box broderie pattern with four pools and the Isolotto at the end with a green theatre, completely transforming the garden. She is said to have swum in the pools, but only at night, safe from prying eyes. She decided not to obliterate the original pattern of the garden. She decided to enhance it and create a new garden which reflects the Renaissance and early Baroque period. She had new trees planted, the theatre at the end, and she changed the four parquets into water parquets, which is a very original feature, and she designed it herself. What I feel is that there are lots of villas and they're beautiful, but what is it about Gambera? There is a kind of balance and magic. It's very hard to define about this place. It is almost the perfect villa, isn't it? The idea of a perfect villa. The idea of a perfect villa, yes. Gambera may seem very simple. Actually, its structure is very complex and there's a double axis which is very interesting. You've got the open countryside this way, you've got the cupola and historic Florence down there. The idea of this garden which floats on the city and in the countryside. The princess's garden is quite complex and with the box and the layers and the interweaving of it, that's very attractive. But it is quite difficult to read from a ground level. Certainly from the other end, you don't really see the water. There's no narrative in the layout. You don't quite know where to go or where it's going to take you. And when you make your way, there doesn't seem to be a logic. Of course, as soon as you get up to Loggia and look down, it's as clear as day. Although Gambera is a garden that has accumulated and changed over 300 years, the essence of it is straight out of the Renaissance garden law book. And Gambera showed that these ideas could work on a relatively modest accessible scale. Visitors could see this and apply its principles to their own gardens. Gambera became famous all over the world, especially the British Isles and America. Architects came here and studied the Gambera along with the great Renaissance villas around Rome. It seems that that reputation has endured and it's lasted right up to the present day. Also because it wasn't so grand, so imposing. And so it could well be adapted to higher middle class used as a model. It's what we would call aspirational. People could aspire to it. The combination of the garden's beauty with its formality and elements, as well as its relative accessibility from Florence, meant that gardeners and designers were drawn to it like a magnet. And the mysterious and lurid tales of Princess Kika only added to the attraction. There's no doubt that this garden sparked a revival in Renaissance gardening, particularly the idea of a Renaissance garden. And then combined with the allure of the princess and her lover, Gambera became something of a cult and was regarded at the turn of the 20th century as the perfect villa and garden. By the end of the 19th century, there was a large expat community living in Florence, drawn by its incredible artistic and architectural treasures, and not least by the much cheaper cost of living. With wonderful Renaissance villas to be rented or bought for a pittance. They never even needed to learn to speak Italian either, because by 1900, it was reckoned that one sixth of the Florentine population was English speaking. There was also another attraction that drew some to Florence. There's a big influx of Americans and British people, and they came here for a number of reasons, the weather, the Renaissance, the arts, the history, it was cheap. But there was also another powerful pull, which was sexual freedom. When people came here, they felt they had a license to behave in a way that they just couldn't do back at home. With its relaxed attitude to extramarital affairs and homosexuality, Florence offered an escape from the buttoned up Victorian values. And its garden soon became the backdrop for the affairs and intrigues of the expat set. Around the corner from Villa Gambera and Settignano, I'm off to visit one such garden. It was once the hub of this libertine Anglo-American community, and also the place where the 20th century neo-Renaissance garden was conceived and created. I'm excited to be visiting this garden at all, because it's not open to the public, and Harvard University, who own it, were a bit wary about letting me in. Anyway, they'd relented. It's called Itati, and it was designed by an Englishman called Cecil Pinsent 100 years ago, and for a long time, it formed the basis of what most people thought an Italian garden should look like. In 1900, an American couple, Bernard Berenson, an art historian specialising in the Renaissance, and his wife, Mary, rented Itati. Later, they bought it and began to make substantial alterations. Mary Berenson commissioned two 23-year-old Englishmen to work on the house, and to create a new garden from the villa's old vineyards. They were the newly qualified architect, Cecil Pinsent, and her husband's secretary, Geoffrey Scott, with whom Mary was having an affair. This was a ruse by Mary to keep Geoffrey Scott around, and Berenson tolerated this, but he actively nurtured Pinsent, and as a Renaissance specialist, sent him to visit formal gardens around Florence for inspiration, including the nearby Villa Gamberaia. All the pictures I've seen of Itati have been the garden spread out. I didn't realise you came through a doorway. And immediately, you could see why people thought that Renaissance gardens were just green, because that is just solid green. There's no other colour through this doorway at all. But what strikes me immediately is that, where in a Renaissance or Baroque parterre, you look down, it's rather two-dimensional. Here, Pinsent has used uprights. There are verticals everywhere. And what that creates are boxes of space. And I don't know why, but that's very satisfying. It's always a good thing in a garden. Very rare to see it just in one colour. Although I can see the influence of his British contemporaries, such as Lachins, Pinsent has made a garden that clearly uses the idioms and structures of Renaissance and Baroque gardens. Central axis, absolute symmetry, green parterres, and the Bosco beyond. It is astonishing that he was a complete novice, and yet he's made the garden into multifaceted architecture. He's ruthlessly excluded all colour except green. And the result is surprisingly modern and contemporary for a garden that was overtly inspired by the Renaissance. You see, despite all this green, there's a lot going on. It's really complex. And once you walk into the garden, it's got real substance. And I love this bit over there, because he's created this texture and architectural shape just using green. Well, there's a wall behind that hedge. So he's planted a hedge on top of a wall and then a hedge in front of a wall. Now, obviously, the wall blocks your view and holds up the landscape, so you don't need the hedge. But by planting them there, he's created this structure, this building made out of green. So it's got a kind of energy, which is exciting, actually. It feels like something's happening. Giorgio Galletti's research at Villa Castello has clearly shown that Renaissance gardens were, in fact, filled with colour. So why did Pinson choose such a restricted palette? The historian Alan Grieco is assistant director at Itati. This was Pinson's first commission. He's not even 35 years old. When he's designing, he doesn't have that much experience. He's coming from a totally different tradition, because the few sketches that we have, we know that he was very interested in very informal gardens. And clearly, coming to Italy, he suddenly discovers this whole world of the formal Italian garden. It is extraordinary when you think about it. Here you have a man who is not yet 25, no experience, and yet he makes a garden that becomes internationally renowned. It's an amazing thing. And one of the old gardeners who knew Pinson said to me once, Pinson told me, I don't know anything about flowers, but in any case, these gardens don't really need flowers. So I thought that was very emblematic. So when they visited Renaissance gardens, what they saw was basically what had survived of these gardens. And therefore, the hedges and the green part was much more likely to survive than any of the flowers. And I think that's where the idea comes from, that it is very much of a green garden. What I do like about this severely monochromatic garden is you have these layers that build up to something very, very special. It starts with the grass and there's a little sound of that. And then that's built upon by the box hedges and different layers of those that interplay with each other. Behind that, you have the cypress hedge clip, but wanting to grow tall. Beyond that, you have the home oak hedge, a different green. And then soaring up, you have the cypresses, majestic, all the same colour and yet building this symphony of green. So the idea of the exclusively green Renaissance Italian garden was a misunderstanding by Edwardian garden makers. They took their cue from 400-year-old gardens that had simply lost their flowers over the centuries. It's become fashionable to criticise Penzi for making a green garden, as though it was his personal fault for this misconception that Italian gardens and Renaissance gardens in particular were just composed of greenery. But actually, I think the fact that Itati is predominantly a green garden is its glory. If it had colours, it would be spoilt, and I love it for what it is. Pinsent and Scott had launched a new fashion for Renaissance-style green gardens, but their partnership didn't last long. Scott ended his affair with Mary Berenson and, true to the spirit of the place, started another with Bernard Berenson's ex-lover. Having captured himself a rich wife, he then lost interest in garden making. But Pinsent flourished and went on to create some of the 20th century's finest gardens. Before heading off to see a very different Pinsent garden, I really wanted to visit a small garden made by an Italian. But astonishingly, I couldn't find one. However, judging by the abundance of flower pots on balconies and window boxes, Florentines clearly love flowers, so it was a puzzle. I headed off to one of the city's very few garden centres to see if I could find out more about this. Are there many people growing plants, making gardens, so that they're nurturing them, and making a garden with their hands? Is gardening popular? Hmm. One thing, I see you sell seeds. Are people growing food? Are they growing vegetables from seed? Here is another foreigner who will buy some seeds. Misti canza. Misti canza, OK. Fruit and... I'll get the rest. Very good. Grazie. Grazie a lei. Arrivederci. Buongiorno. Buongiorno. Although Italians might not be a nation of gardeners, don't seem to grow much of their own fruit and veg, that doesn't mean that they don't understand and appreciate it with a passion. The city's markets are full of the most fabulous quality and range of produce. And all of it is grown right here in Italy. I'd be proud to grow these. Fantastic. What does it say? Santa Croce, Giuseppe. You see, from Italy. Let's try these. Serpenti, yeah? He's saying that actually they come from Tuscany. They have to, by law, put the area it's come from, which of course is from Italy. It's homegrown. Italians really understand food. And part of that understanding involves how it's grown, where it's grown, what the variety is, what season it is. Now, these are things that are really the province of a gardener. The average British gardener relishes those facts. So they, if you like, get their gardening kick through what they eat. And you could argue that the British get their food kick through what they grow. Farming and locally produced produce has always been an important part of Tuscany's wealth and independence. But despite its panoramic beauty, it can be a tough and unyielding agricultural landscape. I'm making a journey 80-odd miles south of Florence to the particularly harsh countryside of the Val d'Orcia. This is the setting for Cecil Pinsent's last Italian garden and one of his greatest, although it was created against the backdrop of the blackest period of modern Italian history. I've come a good two hours' drive south of Florence. And this area in particular was very poor when the garden was made. And Pinsent had to work not just with the garden as a private enclosed space, but connect it to the landscape all around. When the Anglo-American Iris Cutting married Marchese Antonio Origo in 1924, they left Florence to live in the huge but almost destitute estate of La Foci in Val d'Orcia. The Origos immediately set about renovating the impoverished tenant farms, with much help from the government's land improvement scheme. And they also commissioned Cecil Pinsent, now 43, to design the house and garden as a sanctuary from the harshness of the landscape. Pinsent applied his signature green Neo-Renaissance structure. But the flowers that Iris Origo loved were from the outset to be an important part of the garden. I love the way that Pinsent does simple things extremely well. And he obviously loves hedges and uses them brilliantly. So, for example, this path has really unexpected but perfectly balanced proportions. So you have a five-foot-wide path and a wall there, and then a one-foot-high hedge, which is as wide as the path. Which looks absolutely ordinary, but if you think about it, it's really radical. And, of course, the hedge is the backside of another hedge that goes down in front of the wall. So he's created these green spaces. But when you stand here and look out, you see what he's doing with all these hedges. Because the site is very awkward. It slopes down in that direction and it slopes down in this direction. And he wants to take you out towards the landscape. And to do that, he has to level the site. So instead of getting bulldozers out, he uses the hedge tops. And they start thin and they go perfectly level and they drop down and then they level off. And the net result is when you're standing in the garden, you feel balanced. You have the harmony of the Renaissance garden. You feel centred and then you can enjoy it. Today, Iris' daughter Benedetta lives in the villa. She knew Cecil Pinsent when she was a small child. And after a lifetime living with a garden, her respect for his design remains stronger than ever. Pinsent is credited with reviving the Renaissance garden in the 20th century and creating our concept of the Italian garden. How does this garden fit into that? I think it's so successful as a garden just because it's a mixture. My mother was much more botanical. He was much more architectural. Also, Cecil had an extraordinary feel for nature, for the lie of the land itself. This house is oddly placed. But Cecil was not a person who would change the lie of the land. He would work with it. So the garden is always related to the landscape? Oh, yes, absolutely. Now, you knew Pinsent quite well, didn't you? No, I did, yes, yes. He had a lovely, dry, very English sense of humour, which you had to discover because he was quite quiet, shy, very tall. I remember him dressed in brown tweed, which is odd because he came in the summer and he must have been awfully warm. Oh, come on, he must have been boiling. Boiling. Much of this garden feels very familiar and I realise it's because it's essentially an English garden. You've got Pinsent, who's an Englishman, and Arius Arrigio, who was brought up essentially as an English woman, albeit here in Italy. And what they've done is make an English garden that looks at its best in summer, but instead of summer being five days, if you're lucky, in July, it's at least five months of perfect weather. The garden has one last section that was made after the rest was completed. This is a large cypress-lined triangle that you look down on, descending grand stone steps to box hedges at arrow end to the narrow end, along rather brutal lines like blocks of troops at a rally. It's a clever, clever piece of gardening, because as you walk down through it, you have all those different lines of box, green lines folding down towards the point, and that's Pinsent doing his green garden thing with supreme confidence. What it feels like here is 30 years later as someone at the height of his powers, great confidence, but there's a kind of brutality about it. What remains is impressive, but it's not charming. Throughout the 1930s, as Pinsent continued work on the garden, the politics of Europe and Italy were turning ugly. The land improvement scheme that had helped to restore the farmland around La Foce had been an initiative of Benito Mussolini's fascist government, with the intention of making Italy self-sufficient in food. Now Mussolini started using Italy's great garden-making heritage as a propaganda tool, mounting exhibitions and garden tours. And in a deliberate echo of the Medici era, in 1938, Mussolini staged a public pageant in the Boboli Gardens to celebrate the visit of Hitler to Florence. The aim, of course, was to link fascism with the country's glorious Renaissance history. The fascists paraded the Italian garden, green and strong and forthright and beautifully designed, and it was very influential. Still is, really. Still people think of Italian gardens like that. But what the fascists overlooked were the Renaissance ideals of play and charm and decoration and, above all, of humanity. Funds from the fascist government had helped to renovate the Origo's estate. But after war broke out in 1939, La Foce became a sanctuary for Allied forces, as the Origo family risked their lives sheltering escaped British and American prisoners of war who were trying to make their way to safety. And Pinsent, who had completed his garden only months before the outbreak of war, joined the British army as an officer. Pinsent and La Foce survived the war. And today, Alberti's Renaissance ideals that underwrote his 20th-century design are as relevant as ever. That view has become an icon for Tuscany, especially those trying to sell it for holidaymakers. I've seen it at an airport on a poster. But, in fact, you hardly ever see tracks like that in Tuscany. The fields are big and open. And it was made by Benedetto's father as a completely practical thing so that, as he improved the land, you could get vehicles up to the farms that lay beyond. And that was all of a piece of the way that La Foce was made. The garden, the land was improved, the people. And, actually, that ties in with the Renaissance ideals of improving the villa, the garden and the countryside around. My visits to these gardens, both in and around Florence, have shown me that the ideals of the gardens made here 500 years ago, marshalling nature with elegant, rhythmic formality and a surprisingly rich horticultural palette was one of the great artistic features of the Italian High Renaissance and is something that we still instinctively respond to. The Renaissance, for the first time, took gardens and ordered them with harmony. Instead of fighting nature and defending themselves against it, it welcomed it. It looked for interesting plants and created a space that was balanced, symmetrical, but filled with delight and also, incidentally, filled with flowers. Next time, I will be down south, where a much more informal and highly romantic style of garden came to thrive in the beautiful countryside around Naples. It bursts the constraints of the formal Italian garden, despite itself. It can't help itself but be free.