For centuries, the cardinals, popes, and rulers of Italy have devoted themselves to creating vast villa gardens that represent their wealth and power, provide a calm refuge from city life, and showcase lavish plantings and rare flowers. Here, in over two hundred exquisite photographs—taken during the Edwardian era when these historic gardens were at their peak—twenty-two of central Italy"s most ornate and spectacular palace gardens are presented.Italian Gardens reveals the vanished magnificence of the aristocracy"s landscapes in superb images from the archives of Britain"s renowned Country Life magazine. Classic photographs of unrivaled beauty and composition display patterned grottoes, elaborate terraces, sophisticated fountains, antique statuary, and sun-dappled arbors to provide an important record of these gardens at a nostalgic moment in time, before the two World Wars provoked irrevocable changes in Italy"s political and economic climate and many gardens fell into neglect. These...