Villa La Pietra Gardens

The Villa la Pietra Gardens is a living mausoleum of the aesthetic ideals of the past. The Villa’s official website states that the garden (as it is now) was the product of efforts from 1908 to about World War 2. However, the Garden is representative of much more than that. There used to be a walled English garden on the property of which no traces now remain. And, if we were to talk of the “original” garden dated to around the initial completion of the villa of that we don’t have the faintest inkling. Isn't it poignant then that as nature is said to wreak havoc on men that we too rail against it?

There are trees hundreds of years old on the property and the greenhouse which housed the lemon trees (integral to the family’s income) still remains. Yet, what wasn’t too big to change or didn’t provide any monetary value is now gone without a trace. In that sense the garden is reflective of one of the core values explored in the Divine Comedy- man vs. nature (this of course does not exclude himself). It certainly offers a new perspective of Canto XIII. Would it have been crueler if the people who had committed suicide were flowers? To be vulnerable, and only protected as long as someone found them beautiful. Trees can endure a lot more and it is no easy feat to get rid of one. It makes one wonder how much of their fate was a blessing or a curse?