italian
gardens
bluestocking
“I have tried to write
Paradise,”declared EzraPoundin his Cantos.Do notmove/Letthe windspeak/thatis paradise.”Pound spentdecadesin Italyduringhis questtocapture paradiso terrestre. Itisnowonder
he sought heaven on earth in the Italian countryside, as
the popes and cardinals of the Roman Catholic church
created a lion’s share of Italy’s most magnificent formal
gardens during the 16th and 17th centuries in and around
Rome. The prevailing philosophy fueling this cause:
the grander the garden, the greater the clergyman.
Sadly, many of these classical masterpieces did not
survive the garden massacre of 1870 when Rome became
the capital of united Italy and innumerable villas and
gardens were razed to make way for government buildings
and blocks of apartment buildings. Those remaining were
largely denuded and run-down. History owes a great debt
to British photographer Charles Latham, who appreciated the romance of the derelict vine and vase. In the spring of 1903, he captured the extant allées and once finely composed mazes with a frank resonance, which graces the pages of Italian Gardens Romantic Splendor in the Edwardian Age. Because Latham refused to gloss over the decline, the fissures and erosion in each image become the story. They show how the heft of time softened the sharpness of the statuary and pebbled the surface of sculpted concrete. We see the wind speaking—it’s nudging the trees lining the ancient cypress avenue at Villa Mondragone into a curtsy and mists statuesque plumes of water into filmy pillars of light. “A belladonna lily, a Brazilian strawberry with exceptionally large fruit, a live giraffe, an ancient greek bust, a Japanese sword, an African cauldron, flies trapped in amber, a fish’s jaw with a double row of teeth”—these curiosities make an uncanny return through the intimate prose of Helena Attlee, whose lyrical lightness infuses the weight of their history with abundant and hypnotic harm n Saxon Henry , Italian Gardens Romanic Splendor in the Edwardian Age, by Helena Attlee, photography by Charles Latham, Monacelli Press, 2009, randomhouse/ monacelli.com
