Wharton, Edith; Parrish, Maxfield [Ill.]: Italian villas and their gardens (London: John Lane, 1904)

LOMBARD VILLAS
them. Are they like any other gardens on earth? No;
but neither are the mountains and shores about them
like earthly shores and mountains. They are Armida’s
gardens anchored in a lake of dreams, and they should
be compared, not with this or that actual piece of planted
ground, but with a page of Ariosto or Boiardo.
From the garden-student’s point of view, there is
nothing in Lombardy as important as the Isola Bella.
In these rich Northern provinces, as in the environs of
Florence, the old gardens have suffered from the afflu-
ence of their owners, and scarcely any have been
allowed to retain their original outline. The enthusiasm
for the English garden swept over Lombardy like a
tidal wave, obliterating terraces and grottoes, substitut-
ing winding paths for pleached alleys, and transforming
level box-parterres into rolling lawns which turn as
brown as door-mats under the scorching Lombard
sun.
On the lakes, where the garden-architect was often
restricted to a narrow ledge of ground between moun-
tains and water, these transformations were less easy,
for the new style required a considerable expanse of
ground for its development. Along the shores of Como
especially, where the ground rises so abruptly from the
lake, landscape effects were difficult to produce, nor was
it easy to discover a naturalistic substitute for the marble
terraces built above the water. Even here, however,
the narrow gardens have been as much modified as

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