Villa Medicea di Poggio a Caiano

Ordered by Lorenzo il Magnifico from Giuliano da Sangallo, this hilltop villa set an architectural model for later princely residences. Inside waits a great sixteenth-century fresco cycle; around it spread a terraced garden, a park and an entire museum of Medici still-life painting.

Why it matters

Of all the Medici country houses, Poggio a Caiano is the one that changed architecture. Conceived for Lorenzo il Magnifico from about 1480 and built to a design by Giuliano da Sangallo, it abandoned the fortified farmhouse look of earlier villas for a compact, classical block with a temple front, raised on a low hill in the middle of a broad plain near Prato. The villa is part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing of Medici villas and gardens in Tuscany, inscribed in 2013. The house also concentrates an unusual amount of history: two deaths that shook the dynasty, a Napoleonic princess, and one of the major painted cycles of the Tuscan Cinquecento.

What to notice

The facade announces the new style: a triangular pediment carrying the Medici coat of arms above a frieze of polychrome glazed terracotta, a material that ties the classical design back to the Tuscan workshops of the fifteenth century. Inside, the piano nobile holds the Sala di Leone X, whose walls carry a major fresco cycle of sixteenth-century Tuscany: episodes from the life of the Medici pope painted by Pontormo, Andrea del Sarto, Franciabigio and Alessandro Allori. Look at the staircase too — a severe early nineteenth-century work by the Florentine architect Pasquale Poccianti. Upstairs, the second floor shelters the Museo della Natura Morta with around two hundred court paintings. Outside, the nineteenth-century limonaia and the monumental sixteenth-century scuderie frame the garden and park that climb with the villa towards its terrace.

Context and history

Work began in the ninth decade of the fifteenth century and stopped at Lorenzo's death in 1492; it resumed from 1512 under his son Giovanni de' Medici, by then Pope Leo X, and the villa was completed towards the end of that decade. The Medici used the villa for state business and leisure. In October 1587 it was the scene of the double death of Grand Duke Francesco I and his wife Bianca Cappello, an event contemporaries found suspicious and chroniclers never stopped debating. With the Lorraine succession the house passed to the new dynasty, and in the early nineteenth century it became the favourite residence of Elisa Baciocchi, Napoleon's sister, who had the garden remodelled; when Florence became capital of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II had rooms renovated again. Sold to the Italian state, the villa is now run by the regional directorate of national museums with the operator CoopCulture, and locally it is remembered by its old nickname, Villa Ambra, after the legend of the shepherdess Ambra.