Villa Gamberaia

Villa Gamberaia is a villa on the Settignano hillside above Florence, built in the early seventeenth century by the wealthy Florentine merchant Zanobi Lapi after he acquired the property in 1610, on the foundations of an earlier house. It is renowned chiefly for its gardens, laid out in the Tuscan tradition by Lapi and his nephews, which gained their celebrated water parterre, a pair of mirror-like pools bordered by flowering plants, when the Romanian princess Catherine Jeanne Ghyka rebuilt that part of the garden between 1898 and 1900. The novelist Edith Wharton called it probably the most perfect example of producing a great effect on a small scale, and the garden has influenced landscape design across Europe and the United States. Declared of national historic and artistic importance in 1956, the villa remains open to the public as a cultural landmark. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/