The Italian Garden
Subtitle: Art, Design and Culture (Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: November 28, 1996
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 323
ISBN-13: 9780521443531
Subjects: European history: c 1500 to c 1750; Garden design & planning; c 1700 to c 1800; c 1800 to c 1900; Gardens; Landscape Architecture And Design; Landscape Design And Planting; Gardening / Horticulture; Italy; Architecture; History: World; Gardens, Italian; Essays; Europe - Italy; Garden Design; Gardens, Italian--History; History / Europe / General; Europe - General; History
First sentence: Dreamt of or real, evoked by the magic of literary writing or evocatively depicted by painters and miniaturists, gardens invaded the artistic and literary imagination between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as becoming increasingly commonplace inside the turreted cities.
Description: Italian gardens vary widely according to their historical date and geographic location. This collection approaches Italian gardens of all periods, from the middle ages to modern times, and it ranges widely throughout the peninsula, from Genoa to Sicily, the Veneto to Liguria, and Ferrara to Florence.

The authors are a distinguished group of Italian, American, English and German scholars, with different backgrounds in art history, literature, architecture, planning, and cultural history.

The explorations of the subject from these different perspectives illuminate not only their own disciplines, but are concerned to make many fresh connections between garden art and the politics of nationalism, between the art of gardens and urban infrastructure, between cultural movements like freemasonry and site planning, between design and planting materials.

The book offers therefore a narrative of the garden by selecting ten high points of its history, which are introduced with a consideration by the volume editor of the fresh challenges to contemporary Italian garden history.