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The Garzoni villa and garden are extraordinary examples of 18th century Tuscan taste and culture. The Garzonis were a powerful family originally from Pescia who sided with the Ghibellines and promptly had their property confiscated.
They were banished and went into exile, but found refuge in Lucca, where they took on the highest state offices. When it came to building a villa, the contemporary taste for provocation and challenge prompted them to choose this site, which was on the former border between the Grand Duchy and the Republic of Lucca.
The first definite record of the villa dates back to 1633 and to Marquis Romano di Alessandro Garzoni, who was probably also the first architect of the garden, which by 1652 had already adopted its current outline. The formidable labour involved in its completion took a hundred and seventy years and the efforts of three generations.
Its final form and the miracle of the Summer House were due to the ingenuity and whimsy of Ottavino Diodati, translator of the Encyclopèdie and a typical exponent of the Enlightenment in Tuscany.
The garden, laid out like an amazing theatre, with triumphal fountain displays and great star-shaped basins, was the envy of kings and princes.
It may be compared not just with great Italian gardens such as Villa d'Este, Boboli and Reggia di Caserta Park, but also with other E.pean marvels like Versailles, Fontainebleau, Saint-Claud, Potsdam, Wichelmhohe and even the grandiose Schonbrunn of Vienna.
In common with these it expresses the great post-Renaissance ideals, with rigorously geometrical buildings softened by greenery, with the damp gracefulness of flowers, and with statues, architectural masks and fountains displaying comic, epic and fantastic features. Known as the villa of a hundred windows, the building has a fabulous, reflective beauty, especially in its noble living quarters, in the bedroom where Napoleon is said to have slept, and in the imposing kitchen, where Collodi, grandson of the bailiff of the Garzoni household, spent part of his childhood.
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Address
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Piazza della Vittoria, 3
Pescia (PT)
Tel e fax 0572 429590
Sito
Web
E-mail
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Tickets
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€ 8,00 per person
€ 6,00 reduced |
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