Villa della Petraia
When, in 1568 Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici received Villa della Petraia as a gift from his father Cosimo I, he could not be able even to imagine that it would have turned into one of the most beloved family properties. Nor that, centuries later, the first king of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele, would have strolled along its gardens together with the beautiful Rosina, his lover for more than three decades. Ferdinando, when he became Grand Duke, renovated the fourteenth-century “palagio” (palace) into a noble villa, converting the fields full of rocks (in Italian “pietre”, hence the name “Petraia”) into a thriving garden made of overlapping terraces. At the end of XVI century, the first terrace, at the same level of the villa, was called “the garden of the dwarf-fruits”. The trees were so low that even the dames could pick the fruits without any effort.
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Ferdinando, when he became Grand Duke, renovated the fourteenth-century “palagio” (palace) into a noble villa, converting the fields full of rocks (in Italian “pietre”, hence the name “Petraia”) into a thriving garden made of overlapping terraces. At the end of XVI century, the first terrace, at the same level of the villa, was called “the garden of the dwarf-fruits”. The trees were so low that even the dames could pick the fruits without any effort. Nowadays, large shaped lawns surround a beautiful marble fountain crowned by a copy of the statue known as Giambologna Venus. The original bronze is preserved inside the villa. It represents a young woman, the city of Fiorenza, in the act of rinsing her long hair, pouring the beneficial water over the other Tuscan cities, symbolized at her feet. The intermediate terrace, delimited by tall bitter orange espaliers, has always lodged the flower garden. On its west side, in spring, ancient varieties of tulips, hyacinths and fritillaries bloom next to a large rectangular basin, once used as a fish farm and now as a storage for irrigation water. The central double staircase leads to the parterre terrace, where the changes from the sixteenth century project are the most evident. Where two symmetrical ellipses, shaped by woods and tunnels of holm oaks and surrounding a fruit garden, used to be, these days there are gravel paths on a wide and elegant flowered parterre, sloping down towards an eighteenth-century fountain, placed right on the central axis of the garden. On the backside of the villa the ground climbs up towards Morello mountain. Here, around the middle of nineteenth century, upon request of the Lorena family, the Bohemian gardener Joseph Frietsch, designed a romantic park in line with the tastes of the time. A new path connecting the property to the other nearby important villa of the Medici family, Villa di Castello, was built in same period. If you are lucky, during a stroll, you can bump into one of the three deers who live in these woods of cypresses, pines and oaks, retracing on their nimble paws the tracks of four centuries of princes and grand dukes.
