Bob Guarino, Garden Interpreter
My trip to Italy last year was unlike any previous visit, for I was able to tour some of the most spectacular villas that I had only read about in Edith Wharton’s 1904 travel book, Italian Villas and Their Gardens.
I met Judy a few years ago at Bennington College while attending an undergraduate course where we were both studying Italian. Although I had visited relatives in Italy and also travelled there extensively, Judy was a better student, and had even been there more than I, resulting in more fluency.
After a few years, my attendance at the classes became more difficult, so I stopped going. Judy, however, continued and became increasingly fluent. To enlarge her vocabulary and greater enjoy Italian culture, she and her husband, Bill, rented an apartment in Rome. On one of her infrequent return trips to Bennington, she and Bill invited me, along with my friend Jack, to come and stay with them in Rome for as long as we liked. That was an irresistible inducement.
Last November, I was able to take them up on their gracious invitation and flew to Rome for an unforgettable two-week stay. I had decided, however, that rather than revisit sights I had seen before, I would take my knowledge of Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens and trace her encounters with some of the most impressive gardens and majestic villas in and around Rome that she had visited some 120 years before. I set out to compare what she saw and so articulately described with what today I would be able to observe myself.
Her interest in Italian culture resulted from her knowledge of the country accumulated from her frequent visits there, starting as a child when she accompanied her family on a six year stay in Europe, followed by multiple trips there as a married woman along with her husband, Teddy. One particular visit, begun in 1903 with her husband, was the result of a commission from Century Magazine to do a series of articles on Villas that she deemed important to visit, some well-known, and some more obscure.
Century Magazine’s interest in employing Wharton to write these articles was partially based on her very successful 1902 novel, The Valley of Decision, set in 18th-century Italy, in which she demonstrated her vast knowledge and understanding of Italian art and culture. These articles, many of which were accompanied by drawings by the popular artist Maxfield Parrish, were compiled into a book published in 1904 as Italian Villas and Their Gardens. It was essentially a travel book, providing the reader with a deep understanding of villas and their associated gardens and how in Italy the word Villa included not only the house but the gardens as well.
One of the villas that Edith had been eager to see was Villa Farnese at Caprarola, a small medieval village some 30 miles northwest of Rome. Her visit to Caprarola in 1903 was a very exciting trip for her, as it was the first time she had ever ridden in an automobile, or motor, as she called them. The excursion was even more memorable, as the owner of the automobile was her Boston friend, George von Lengerke Meyer, who happened to be the United States ambassador to Italy. Neither Judy nor Bill are ambassadors, but I also found my visit memorable, as you will see in the video below.
This was just one of the majestic villas that Edith Wharton visited and depicted so elegantly and descriptively in her book Italian Villas and Their Gardens, the contents of which has led me on the trail of her excursions through Italy to see and compare them to the present after the intervening 120 years.