Product Description

One hundred years ago, Edith Wharton wrote of her love of Italy which was the first to treat the sub ject of Italian garden architecture seriously. It became a groundbreaking work that influenced a generation of garden writers and landscape architects. In this book, photographer Vivian Russell retraces Edith Wharton's steps to photo

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82713 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

Amazon.com Review
Though most know her as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of novels such as The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton was also something of a doyenne of domestic taste, and fortunately neither a nearsighted nor a parochial one. She published the first serious treatment of Italian garden architecture, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, in 1904. A lifelong Italophile as well as a lifelong gardener herself, Wharton had an instinctive attraction to both the clipped precision and the sensuous disarray that characterize an Italian villa garden. Nineteen of the gardens Wharton and her illustrator Maxfield Parrish brought to public attention are virtually unchanged by the passage of the single century since her descriptions were written. Garden photographer and writer Vivian Russell has recaptured both the essence of the gardens themselves and Wharton's experience of them in a series of luscious photographs and historical summaries of each garden. The Villa Cetinale, pictured on the cover from the vantage point of its lemon garden, was singled out by Wharton for its charm and its long green park, marked by a 15th-century gateway at one end and a romitorio, or hermitage, at the other.

The book's considerable charm lies in the historical perspective it affords of Wharton and her Victorian colleagues as well as the many centuries borne so gracefully by the beautiful land they loved. It's a marvelous homage to Wharton and a must-read for all lovers of things Italian.

From Booklist
Famous American author Edith Wharton adored Italy--adored Italian gardens, in particular. In 1904 she published a series of commentaries on that subject, Italian Villas and Their Gardens. Contemporary garden authority and photographer Russell recently followed the trail blazed by Wharton around the Italian peninsula, relooking at the gardens the previous writer had favored in her collection of articles, which has come to be regarded as a groundbreaking reckoning of Italian landscape art and architecture. The result is this lovely oversize book, which will appeal to gardeners and fiction devotees as well as travel enthusiasts. Beautifully composed and reproduced photos match the enthusiastic text (which tells the history of each villa) in fostering a real sense of seeing things as Wharton saw them and in compelling the viewer to appreciate the uniquely Italian aesthetics underlying the creation of the gardens. This book is a very nice treat. Brad Hooper

Customer Reviews

Not bad at all
This is not the ultimate writing on Italian gardens, nor the most sumptuos as a coffee-table book. But you can do a lot worse than this when you search for garden books on Italy. And then there is the added dimension that Mrs Wharton drove up to these places a hundred years ago and had a look around. Gentle people alledgedly just showed up "never mind us, we're just here for a stroll in your lovely garden", not recommended today...
Photographs are very good/good. The selection of gardens covers the major part of the most celebrated, with a few minor ones added. No sites south of Rome alas, put the blame on Edith.

Edith Wharton's Italian Gardens
With plenty of pics, this book is good for a casual flick through or a more careful read. The photographs of the gardens are stunning and inspire a desire to visit in person.