The Gardens of Venice and the Veneto

Includes monastery gardens quietly cultivated in the islands of the lagoon, magnificent villas on the Brenta Canal, and baroque masterpieces in the hills beyond. Highlights include an eerie Masonic garden complete with gothic chapel and cavernous grottoes, a pleasure garden made for his workers by a benevolent nineteenth-century industrialist, and a flower-filled delight by the banks of the Grand Canal. The garden behind Henry James's Aspern Papers is here, along with the garden which so beguiled Margaret Symonds, the young English author of Days Spent on a Doge's Farm. With an emphasis on gardens that can be visited, longtime resident Jenny Condie elucidates the dynastic triumphs, the reversals of fortune, and the shifts in taste and influence which have shaped these extraordinary places.