Villa La Petraia

Villa La Petraia is a Medici villa in the Castello district of Florence that began as a fortified palace of the Brunelleschi family in 1364 and was expanded after Palla Strozzi bought it in 1422. Cosimo I de' Medici acquired the property in 1544 and gave it to his son Cardinal Ferdinando in 1568, after which extensive terracing work from 1588 onward reshaped the hillside site; the garden design is traditionally credited to Bernardo Buontalenti. Later owners in the House of Savoy added a glass roof over the central courtyard and an aviary, and a nineteenth century belvedere on the upper terrace looks out over Florence. Transferred to the Italian state in 1919, it is now a museum, part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing of the Medici villas and gardens, and displays Giusto Utens's surviving lunette paintings of the Medici villas. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/