Giardino di Villa La Foce

Iris Origo and Cecil Pinsent turned a fifteenth-century villa above Chianciano Terme into a garden of terraced rooms, travertine stairs and a cypress avenue that frames the valley UNESCO protects.

Why it matters

The estate of La Foce stands on a hillside that looks straight down the Orcia valley, inside a landscape the World Heritage listing describes as redrawn in Renaissance times to express an ideal of good governance. Its villa dates from the late fifteenth century; in 1924 it was bought by Antonio and Iris Origo, whose restoration and planting created what the family estate itself calls one of Italy's most beautiful private gardens. The garden is the reason this particular slope appears on so many covers: the axis of hedges and staircases was composed to end at the valley, not at a wall. It remains the working centre of the Origo family's agricultural company.

What to notice

The garden's design unfolds through a sequence of spaces. The formal Italian garden near the house is built of geometric rooms boxed in clipped hedges, with lemon trees in pots moved with the seasons. Travertine stairs drop to a rose garden, and a pergola heavy with wisteria runs along a border of lavender. Below the terraces, the planting loosens: informal banks hold cherry trees, pines, cypresses, broom, thyme and rosemary, kept deliberately rough so the geometry above reads stronger. A seventeenth-century stone statue marks the cypress avenue, while the family cemetery in the surrounding wood holds the graves of Iris, Antonio and their son Gianni. The compositions are aimed at Mount Amiata and the winding Orcia valley, treating the view as a garden room in its own right.

Context and history

The garden was laid out in phases between 1925 and 1939 with the English architect Cecil Pinsent, whom the Origos hired to restore the villa and give the new farm a setting worthy of its position. Pinsent's idiom — Renaissance-inspired rooms, box, stone stairs, shaded walks — belongs to the Anglo-Florentine current of the early twentieth century, but the brief here was Tuscan: frame the classical view over the Orcia valley and Mount Amiata without cluttering it. The UNESCO listing for the Val d'Orcia, adopted for the cultural landscape around criteria (iv) and (vi), credits the area's Renaissance landowners with reshaping hills and farms to express ideals of balanced land management; the garden at La Foce is a twentieth-century reading of exactly that tradition. The estate's operator records first prize in the "Il Parco più bello d'Italia" competition among the garden's distinctions.