Grand Tour

The country residences of the grand dukes were a great attraction for visitors as they were located in those “environs” of Florence that had been seen from the outset as the most enjoyable accompaniment to the tour of the city’s monuments, an area blessed with even more refined delights than the already rich, at times oppressively rich, range offered by the city itself. In fact the villas were scattered over the hilly territory which had made the region so popular, especially among the British, as much and even more so than that “Athens of Italy”, Florence.
The villas appear without any precise criterion of preference in the accounts of travelers, which rarely specified their location. It is hard to derive a list of favorites from them, but many references can be found to the following residences: Villa Medici at Fiesole (constructed between 1458 and 1461 by Michelozzo for Cosimo the Elder’s second son Giovanni de’ Medici) was one of the oldest Renaissance dwellings with a garden, where Lorenzo the Magnificent – who inherited it in 1469 after the premature death of his brother – loved to immerse himself in poetic contemplation in the company of his guests. It was here in fact that Politian, who celebrated the splendid roses that grew in the little “secret garden” in his verses, composed his Rusticus. The villa remained in the possession of the Medici family until 1671. After changing hands several times, it was sold in 1772 to Lady Orford, Horace Walpole’s sister-in-law.
Poggio a Caiano, designed by Giuliano di Sangallo, was the setting for important events in the dynastic history of the Medici, including the celebration of marriages as it was a custom for the Florentine nobility to go to the villa to pay their respects to all new grand-ducal brides before they entered the city. The villa played a part in the lurid story of Grand Duke Francis I and his former lover, the noblewoman Bianca Capello. Both met their deaths there in the October of 1587, within a day of one another, and the probable cause, a tertian fever, was long overshadowed by the embroideries of the oral tradition, which handed down the rumor of a suspected poisoning. The villa was the favorite residence of Cosimo III’s son Prince Ferdinand, a great lover of the arts who turned it into a lively cultural centre. On the death of Gian Gastone (1737), Ferdinand’s brother and the last Medicean grand duke of Tuscany, the villa passed to the new rulers, the Habsburg-Lorraine, who continued to use it as a summer residence or a stopover on their journeys to Prato or Pistoia. According to Cochin (1749-51), there was «nothing magnificent» about the building, although it did house «a precious collection of small pictures by the best artists of Italy and Flanders, almost all very beautiful». This (the presence of a “small” collection) was something almost all the villas had in common, according to travelers. At Poggio Imperiale – again in the words of Cochin – «although there is a large quantity of pictures, very few are worthy of note». In compensation, however, « ach room of this building houses cabinets, pendulum clocks and tables built out of the most precious materials, and the furniture, in each room, is in matching style». Gibbon’s verdict was not so well-disposed, declaring in 1764, after demolishing the villa point by point, that the building was «not at all worthy of its owner and of the praise that it receives». Careggi, also built by Michelozzo, became with Lorenzo de’ Medici (who died there in 1492) a shrine to poetry and a meeting place for admirers of ancient philosophy, as the seat of the Florentine Accademia Platonica, established in 1459 and animated by Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, Donatello, Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti.

Yet it was the villa at Pratolino, constructed for Francis I between 1570 and 1575 by Bernardo Buontalenti, who made it a masterpiece of beauty and ingenuity, that caught the imagination of travelers from all over Europe. Castellan (1804) declared that «of all the numerous and magnificent country houses of the rulers of Tuscany, the one at Pratolino is undoubtedly the most remarkable. Nature had provided its elements, art has done no more than put them to work.» The garden contained works of extraordinary scenic effect in what was a genuine explosion of the most refined Florentine Mannerist culture: evergreen forests, mazes, beautiful and rare trees and flowers, fountains and plays of water (water was, in fact, the basic feature at Pratolino), game of all kinds, the celebrated grottoes with their myriad of surprises orchestrated by Buontalenti’s engineering talents (the Grottoes of the Flood, the Samaritan Woman, Cupid and more), aviaries and an oak tree rigged so that rain would fall from its branches. All were concealed from the eyes of passersby in order to increase the sense of surprise when they actually arrived in front of the «castle,» whose interior was filled with precious marble, stuccoes, mosaics, frescoes, pictures and statues, «in short everything of the greatest refinement that the luxury and taste of the Medici had been able to imagine.» This fascinating world also harbored a “wonder” of the age, Giambologna's colossal statue of the god of the Apennines , which stirred Castellan to real flights of enthusiasm: «it would be difficult to imagine a more picturesque and perfect composition in all its proportions.» Above all he was impressed by the happy synthesis achieved by the artist between the rules of sculpture and those of construction.
The villa was still splendid in the reign of Ferdinand, who built a permanent theater there and invited musicians of international fame, from Scarlatti to Handel, to perform in it. He also had a collection of stringed instruments made by Stradivarius and financed the research of Bartolomeo Cristofori into what was to become the modern piano. The theater was one of the finest in Europe but closed on the prince's death, in 1713. With the arrival of the Lorraine the villa, already in a precarious state after the death of the “grand prince,” deteriorated rapidly. Some of the statues were transported to Boboli and the objects of value to Palazzo Pitti, but the villa's fate was by then sealed.