Italian Villas and their Gardens

Authors

• Edith Wharton, Century Magazine
• Maxfield Parrish

Document Type

Archival Material

Date of this Version

1904

Citation

New York: The Century Company, 1904.

Comments

Public domain. Acquired from: https://archive.org/0/items/italianvillast00whar/italianvillast00whar.pdf

Abstract

Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904) followed her debut novel, The Valley of Decision (1902). Century magazine commissioned Wharton for a series of six articles on Italian architecture and an accompanying book-length collection. Wharton embarked out of Boston in January 1903, disembarked near Genoa, and proceeded to tour widely — Viterbo up to Orvieto; Siena, Florence, Rome, and Venice — following recommendations from Vernon Lee, the book’s dedicatee, who “better than anyone else, has understood and interpreted the garden-magic of Italy.” The book analyzes more than eighty wonders, intercut with fifty-two illustrations: wide-angle photographs and evocative color compositions by the American painter Maxfield Parrish. It includes familiar landscapes — Villa d’Este and the Boboli Gardens, the Mannerist Medici villa and the abutting Borghese park — enriching architectural history with fine-grain descriptions and fresh impressions. The book remained one of Wharton’s favorite projects. In A Backward Glance, her 1934 autobiography, she writes: “I never enjoyed any work more than the preparing of that book, but neither do I remember any task so associated with physical fatigue.”