Florentine villas

About a mile outside the great three-storied gateway of San Niccolò stands the old brown villa of Rusciano, which even in the days of Sacchetti had the reputation of changing masters more frequently than any other in Tuscany. It is first mentioned in 785, when Charlemagne is said to have granted the estate to the church of San Miniato a Monte; three centuries later Pope Nicholas II, gave it to the hospital of St Eusebius, popularly known as San Sebbo; then it belonged to two sisters, Buoninsegna and Princia, who in 1267 sold the house and lands to the nuns of San Jacopo in Pian di Ripoli. After passing through several other hands it was bought by Luca Pitti, who crowned the beautiful hill with what Vasari calls “a luxurious and superb palace,” built, or rather adapted and enlarged for him in 1434 by Brunelleschi, to render it a fitting residence for one who was Gonfalonier of Florence and at the height of his prosperity.

Herr Cornel von Fabriczy⁠[27] considers that only the eastern side of the villa is Brunelleschi’s work, the western being the original building, while the southern façade dates from late in the sixteenth century. One of the glories of Rusciano, much written about by critics, is a most beautiful window looking into the courtyard, but lately covered in. It is said by some to be by Brunelleschi, but the exaggerated consoles ornamented with acanthus leaves, and the pillars at the sides with Corinthian capitals, are not like the work of the great master. The garlands of flowers at the sides, tied in here and there, remind one of those on the monument to Marsuppini by Desiderio da Settignano, as does the delicate frieze at the top. Herr von Fabriczy suggests that this lovely window, which recalls those of the palaces at Urbino and at Gubbio, may perhaps have been designed by Luciano da Laurana, architect to Federigo di Montefeltre, to whom, as we shall see, the villa belonged for a short time. Anyhow this one richly ornamented piece of architecture contrasts strangely with the absolute simplicity, almost amounting to bareness, of everything else in the courtyard. Dr Carl von Stegmann, in his Architekten der Renaissance thinks the frieze and the shape of the capitals are in the style of Desiderio da Settignano, while the garlands of flowers remind him more of the work of Benedetto da Majano. The rooms of the villa are of huge size, and many still retain their fine old wooden ceilings, gigantic beams resting on simply-shaped consoles with curved outlines.

Luca Pitti would have been a happier man had he taken to heart the wise words of Cosimo de’ Medici. “You,” said Cosimo, “strive towards the indefinite, I towards the definite; you aspire to reach the heavens with your ladder, I place mine on the earth so that I may not climb so high as to fall: and if I desire that the honour and reputation of my house should surpass yours, it seems to me but just and natural that I should favour rather mine own than what belongs to you. Nevertheless let us do as big dogs, which meeting, sniff one at the other and then, both having teeth, separate and go their ways: you to attend to your concerns, I to see after mine own.” But the character of Luca was correctly gauged by that acute and charming lady, Alessandra Macinghi, married to a Strozzi, who calls him, in her letters to her exiled sons after their father’s death which give so vivid a picture of what wives and mothers endured in the good old times, “a vain ambitious man and a weathercock, moreover badly surrounded.” After intriguing against the Medici, and even plotting to assassinate Cosimo’s son Piero, Luca Pitti abandoned the anti-Medicean faction and accepted pardon at the hands of Piero, after which his old friends scorned him and avoided meeting him in the streets.

In the summer of 1472 the Gonfalonier of Florence, Tanai de’ Nerli, received the Captain-General of the Florentine army, Count Federigo di Montefeltre, outside the city gates and escorted him, amid the acclamations of the citizens, to the Piazza, where the magistrates thanked him for his services in conquering rebellious Volterra, and presented him with a richly caparisoned charger and a silver helmet studded with jewels and chased in gold by Pollajuolo, with Hercules trampling on a griffin (the device of Volterra) as its crest. The grateful Republic also bought Rusciano of Luca Pitti and bestowed it on their victorious general together with the freedom of the city. But he does not seem to have inhabited his Florentine villa long, for in the following year it was let to Giuliano Gondi, and towards the end of the fifteenth century Federigo’s successor, Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino, sold it to the Frescobaldi. After this Rusciano changed hands every few years and was owned by the Covoni, Usimbardi, Capponi, Gerini and many other less illustrious Florentine families, until in 1825 it came into the possession of an Englishman, Mr Baring, and after three more sales the noble old villa now belongs to Baron von Stumm.

The Baron is a master in the art of landscape gardening, and with a northerner’s love for trees has transformed the grounds into a veritable earthly paradise, whence lovely views of Florence, framed by rare conifers and bays, are like so many glimpses of a fairy city. When seen on a morning with deep snow lying on every mountain, while a pale tinge of colour among the vineyards tells of coming spring in the valley of the Arno, and the city, usually so brown and strongly defined upon the river banks, shines white as though reflecting the dazzling snow peaks around, one is tempted to exclaim with Rogers,

All the town lies below us, but unlike the vast unbroken bird’s-eye view from Bellosguardo or San Miniato, here we only feel her presence, and while listening to the midday bells we see, between two clumps of slender bamboo, Palazzo Vecchio looming like some enchanter’s castle out of the thick atmosphere and suffused with rosy hues. The mysterious feeling of the building is enhanced, for the bay and olive trees hide the houses around it and nothing of the modern town is visible.

Such a city, seen from a terrace where a column of purest marble makes the rose tints of the sky more clearly felt, may well inspire her people to weave legends, even in this century of ours, as to her having been built by angels in the night. Between the cypresses the Duomo, sometimes so russet brown above the city it is guarding, to-day is toned and mellowed in the winter sunlight, and the downward markings of its cupola shine like ribs of alabaster. Whiter still and fairer rises the campanile “coloured like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea shell.”

The terraced garden of Rusciano, where granite columns with capitals encircled by dolphins rise amidst palms and magnolias, lies on the southern side of the villa facing the heights of Monticci.

A watch-tower on the slopes, a little village in the plain with pointed bell-tower rising above the jutting roofs of peasant houses low-lying among the fruit trees, hills palely outlined, their cypress-covered summits seen against still paler distance, pine trees along the valley wreathed in mist and nearer, olive trees reflecting, like so many mirrors, the radiant hues of the morning sunlight on each of their small pointed leaves—all these things and many more we see from the garden of Rusciano.