Villa Gamberaia, built in the Tuscan style by the Florentine gentleman-merchant Zanobi Lapi in the early 1600s, is located on the hillside of Settignano, overlooking the city of Florence, Italy and the surrounding Arno Valley. The villa is celebrated for the unique design of its gardens, originally laid out by Zanobi Lapi and his nephews in the first half of the seventeenth century and preserved until now with few major changes. According to Edith Wharton, the Gamberaia was "probably the most perfect example of the art of producing a great effect on a small scale". The design has inspired landscape and garden architects throughout the world, including Charles Platt, A. E. Hanson, and Ellen Shipman in the United States and Cecil Pinsent and Pietro Porcinai in Italy and the UK. In 2010 the Gamberaia was chosen as the model for the "RCSF Tuscan garden", recreated at Snug Harbor, Staten Island, New York.
History
The first mention of the property dates to the late fourteenth century and refers to the grant to Giovanni Benozzo in 1398 of a farm and house in the place called Gamberaia by the Abbess of San Martino a Mensola. The place-name "gamberaia" probably refers to the farming of fresh-water shrimp in local ponds. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a house with land, in part cultivated, in part planted with vineyards belonged to the Gamberelli family: Matteo, his sons, among whom the well-known sculptors and architects Antonio and Bernardo "Rossellino", and their descendants. In 1610 the property was acquired by Zanobi Lapi, a wealthy and cultivated Florentine merchant with ties to the Medici court, and it is he and his nephews who were responsible for the construction of the villa, on the foundations of an earlier casa da signore, and the subsequent layout of the gardens. Evidence of Lapi ownership and patronage is visible in an inscription on the architrave of a door inside the east entrance to the villa ("Zenobius Lapius erexit ac fundavit A.D. MDCX") and in the heraldic lions carved on vases above the gate to the gabinetto rustico and in the relief sculptures of the nymphaeum (or 'Neptune grotto'). Documents of Zanobi's time mention a limonaia, a lawn area, and ilex woods, which remain essential parts of the garden plan, and the conduits that convey water from the springs above the nymphaeum to the several fountains, a complex hydraulic system that still functions today. The architects who built the villa and carried out the massive engineering project that extended the main terrace of the villa to the south, thus creating the long north-south axis of the bowling green and the area of the parterre, have not been identified. Recent studies, however, point to the Florentine architectural tradition of Bartolomeo Ammannati, Bernardo Buontalenti, and Giovanni Battista Caccini and the influence in the gardens and grottos of the theatrical designer Giulio Parigi. In 1718, as the fortunes of the surviving Lapi declined, the property was divided between the Capponi and Cerretani families. The villa with its formal gardens passed to Piero and Vincenzo Capponi, who undertook its restoration. The Capponi estate map, or cabreo, dating to c.1725, documents their improvements and embellishments, notably in the addition of busts and statues (allegories of the seasons) in the gabinetto rustico. The etching of the villa by Giuseppe Zocchi, included in his Vedute delle Ville e d'altri luoghi della Toscana of 1744, depicts its handsome façade facing Florence, the series of terraces on which the house and gardens were constructed, the recent planting of young cypresses along the entrance road and southern edge of the garden avenue, and the fountain displays. Two other etchings show the entrance gate on via del Rossellino and the country roads skirting the villa to the northeast. Zocchi's prints were especially popular among visitors on the Grand Tour and reveal the growing international prestige of the Gamberaia. Following the sale of the villa in 1854 by the last Capponi owner to Pietro Favreau of Guadaloupe, the property passed to members of the D’Outreleau family and, in turn, to the Fazzini, but from the 1890s it appears to have become increasingly neglected. Carlo Placci, Serge Wolkonski, and Gabriele D’Annunzio, who visited the gardens in the 1890s, all noted signs of decay – though they also felt its mysterious, poetic atmosphere.[i] It was in fact the very silence and tranquility of the place that attracted the Romanian princess Catherine Jeanne Ghyka, sister of Queen Nathalie of Serbia, and inspired her to purchase the villa in 1896
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