Villa Gamberaia

Located in the hills of Settignano, in a splendid panoramic position overlooking the city of Florence and the Arno valley, Villa Gamberaia stands on the site where documents of the late 1300s attest the presence of a farmhouse belonging to the Convent of S. Martino a Mensola. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the farm was bought by Matteo di Domenico, whose sons, Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino adopted the surname Gamberelli and were among the most important architects and sculptors of the time. The name of the family and the Villa can probably be traced back to the word ‘gamberi’, fresh-water shrimp bred in nearby ponds or streams.

At the beginning of the 1600s, Zanobi Lapi, a wealthy and cultured Florentine merchant, who had made his fortune in the manufacture and trade of luxury fabrics, acquired the Villa and began the construction of the main house, exploiting, in part, existing foundations. It is to him and his two nephews that we must also attribute the arranging of the main areas of the garden and the ingenious system of water conduits and fountains. A century later, the estate passed into the hands of the Capponi Marquis. Thanks to the renovations and embellishments they carried out, the Villa soon became known as one of the most beautiful in Florence.

Its distinctive elements can be found in the ancient “cabreo” or contemporary plan of the estate (c.1725-30) and in the engravings by Giuseppe Zocchi (c.1744): the two longitudinal axes, oriented from north to south, the entrance drive lined by rows of cypress trees and the long garden avenue, the bowling-green, the transversal axis, running from east to west, through the ‘cabinet de rocaille’ (rustic cabinet), flanked by groves of oaks, the upper terrace with its lemon-house and, at the southern end, the sophisticated French parterre complete with an aviary and a “garenna” or “island of the rabbits”. Adorning the grottoes and walls of the gardens are statues, busts of the four seasons and urns.

The most recent intervention in the garden, and the only one carried out in the modern era, was the transformation of what remained of the old ‘parterre de broderie’ located to the south of the Villa at the behest of two talented owners: the Romanian princess Catherine Jeanne Ghyka, née Keşko, sister of Queen Natalia of Serbia, who designed the famous ‘parterre d’eau’ (started in the period 1896-98) and the American Matilda Cass Ledyard, Baroness von Ketteler, who gave the garden the predominantly “evergreen” character and the architectural forms (c.1925-1935) that we can still admire today.

After its partial destruction during the II World War, in 1954 the Villa was purchased by Italian industrialist Marcello Marchi, whose family owned other historic residences in Tuscany. It was he and his wife Nerina von Erdberg who undertook the enormous task of rebuilding the house and restoring the gardens, restoring them to their former glory and immortalised in the photographs taken by Balthazar Korab (1966). In 1994, the ownership of the Villa passed to their daughter Franca († 1998) and her husband Luigi Zalum, who continued the work of conservation and restoration initiated by her father. Formerly from the Serbian principality of Zahlum (today Herzegovina) the Zalum family is known for its mercantile and banking activities in the city of Livorno since the early 1700s.