Villa Le Balze

Villa Le Balze is a garden villa on the Via Vecchia Fiesolana in Fiesole, in the Metropolitan City of Florence, Italy, built between 1912 and 1913 for the American philosopher Charles Augustus Strong to designs by Cecil Pinsent and Geoffrey Scott in a Renaissance style, its seven formal gardens set into the hillside. Strong, whose wife Elizabeth Rockefeller was a daughter of John D. Rockefeller, lived at the villa for much of his life writing philosophical works, and the property suffered serious damage during the Second World War when German forces occupied it and Allied troops later bombarded it. After Strong's death in 1940 his daughter Margaret Rockefeller Strong maintained the villa before donating it to Georgetown University in 1979. The three acre campus now serves as a Georgetown University study abroad center for Italian culture and civilization, hosting around seventy to eighty students a year.