Luchino Visconti and his sister
Verde walk me round the shady 25-acre garden at Grazzano
Visconti, near Piacenza, in Emilia-Romagna. Tall and slim, with big,
baleful brown eyes, like a pair of elegant greyhounds, they are the epitome of
well-bred, beautifully mannered Italians. They speak shamingly
fluent English.
Verde and Luchino - who shares a name with his great-uncle, the
director of classic films such as The Leopard (1963), The Damned (1969) and
Death in Venice
(1971) - grew up at the early-15th-century castle, which was given to their
great-grandfather Giuseppe by his father, Guido, in about 1900. The siblings,
who both live in Milan, have houses in the
grounds, and in summer they move into the 15-bedroom castle to escape the heat
of the Po basin, where temperatures can rise
to 40C. (Conversely, it is too cold for them to use in cooler months, as there
is no central heating.)
This summer, when
they and their friends want to cool off in the swimming pool, hidden beyond a
clump of bamboos, they will have to cover up as they trot across the garden - they are sharing it with visitors for the first
time.
When we were
small, we looked at the garden as a private pleasure, says Verde.
When we grew up, we realised how beautiful and
special it is. It is nice to see it alive; people walking around and getting
enthusiastic about it.
Like his
great-uncle, Luchino, 43, directs films, albeit in
advertising. Verde, 39, is director of PR and celebrities (she is
rather embarrassed about the title) at Prada.
That the scions
of one of the grandest families in Milan - its serpent crest adorns many of the
buildings in the city it ruled from 1277 until 1447 - should be opening the
grounds of their home to Giuseppe Pubblico is due in
large part to the diplomatic and organisational
skills of a British woman, Judith Wade, 54, who moved to Italy in 1972. In 1997
she set up Grandi Giardini Italiani as a network to help visitors find their way round
some of the best gardens in the country and to provide help to owners with
marketing and communications. (She used to work in PR.) There were originally
12 on her books; now there are 74, with more than 6m visitors in total last
year.
The success of
the scheme is bringing in more gardens, including Grazzano.
I think Judith has done an amazing job at promoting such places with
garden-lovers all over Europe, not only in Italy, says Luchino. Having decided to open up our own garden for
visits, it was only logical to contact her.
Participants
include familiar favourites such as the Hanbury gardens, in Ventimiglia,
near the French border, Florences Boboli
gardens, Villa dEste, on Lake Como, and La Mortella, near
Naples. More
secret ones include Parco di Palazzo Malingri di Bagnolo, in Piedmont, described by Wade as a romantic
garden with ruins; Villa Pisani Bolognesi Scalabrin, near Padova,
designed by an Irish lady, very romantic, with climbing roses
everywhere; and Palazzo Coronini Cronberg, tucked away in Gorizia
[on the border of Slovenia], a perfect example of Mitteleuropean
refined taste.
As Wade points
out, she is not the first Briton to become involved in Italian gardens. We
Brits, from the lords and ladies who built winter retreats in Italy, from [the
designers] Cecil Pinsent to Russell Page, from poets
and writers down to me, have been contributing for more than 100 years to the
gardening scene in Italy.
Indeed, had it
not been for British and American tourists visiting gardens in the hungry years
after the second world war, many would have been in
trouble, as this was not a local tradition. Cultural tourism in Italy is still
really badly organised, says Wade. When she set
up the scheme, many gardens were not even listed in the phone book, and
there were few road signs. Visiting gardens was considered to be for
middle-aged tourists; Italians were not in the habit of driving miles to walk
round a garden.
She has also had
to contend with the fierce individualism of the owners. Italians have no
inclination for teamwork, she says. Although their names might be largely
unfamiliar in this country, more than 50 of them are multimillionaires, and
Wade has had to convince them that opening their gardens is worth the effort.
Often, as
the owners are so terribly well off, I find it difficult to find a reason why
they should go to the bother of opening them, she says. The British
have a stronger sense of contributing to the community. Even the wealthy,
however, like to see some return on their assets, especially when the garden is
one of many they own and is visited by the family only a few days a year.
At Grazzano, Luchino and Verde come
down at weekends and during the summer. Paying visitors go roundin
parties under the watchful eye of a guide; otherwise, they tend to trample over
rose bushes in pursuit of a good photograph. Many have yet to learn the
etiquette of visiting someone elses garden.
For Luchino, opening to the public was a catalyst for tackling Grazzanos grounds, which had slightly gone to seed.
We didnt want it to be ruined and
neglected, he says. The idea of trying to get it back on track was
spurred by our love of the place. Neither sibling would claim to have
green fingers - there are two full-time gardeners, and
contractors are called in for big jobs - but they knew that something they had
loved since childhood needed some work.
When their
great-grandfather was given Grazzano, according to Luchino, it was a half-broken-down castle, with a
church in the village and a couple of houses. He had this insane idea of
building an entire village and redoing the castle with gardens around it.
Giuseppe Visconti
possessed the happy combination of bags of money, time and talent. Among his
interests were opera, theatre and painting; and from 1914 to 1919 he was
president of Milans
Internazionale football team. He replaced the peasants hovels outside the castle gates with a
neo-medieval village, painting many of the murals himself. It is now a popular
tourist attraction, with 300,000 visitors a year.
Giuseppe also
produced seven children, one of whom was the director, who died of a stroke in
1976, at 69. Luchino Jr was only a child when his
great-uncle died, and his memories are vague.
Back
to the garden.
A hundred or so years ago, this was just flat lands and fields, Luchino says as we pass by cool avenues of specimen trees
and pert-bottomed statues, their heads crowned with ivy. Unlike the classical
Italian gardens of clipped-box parterres, cypress and pots of citrus, Grazzano has a wilder feel, planted with nonnative trees
that stand next to clumps of slightly incongruous bamboo. The English had
an empire, so they would collect plants from all over the world, he says.
In Italy,
having a garden full of exotic plants was not the thing to do; thats why
it is unusual.
The garden
reflects the eclectic tastes of its creator, rather than following a certain style
- even the formal parterres filled with roses and yet more statues have a hint
of theatrical eccentricity about them. Giuseppe was a compulsive
person, Luchino explains. He didnt make a plan of the
garden.
Having revitalised the main areas, Verde and Luchino
are concentrating on getting the large vegetable garden up and running again.
They have sunk a well in the grounds to improve irrigation - the original
system used a series of sluice gates to flood different areas, but in these
days of water shortages, that is no longer practical.
With busy lives
elsewhere, they and other Italian owners would probably not have taken such
actions were it not for Wades Mary Poppins-like
intervention. It took me a decade to convince owners and curators that networking
would help them to share problems and create visibility, but would not
interfere with their independence, she says. Everyone runs their
gardens as they please, but now they can learn from other peoples
experiences.
Who knows, one
day Luchino and Verde might find themselves, having
caught the gardening bug, swapping pruning tips with fellow members?
The gardens at
Grazzano Visconti are open until June 29, then from
August 29 to November 2. For more Italian gardens, visit www.grandigiardini.it