The South Monty Don's Italian Gardens

'I have been travelling through Italy, exploring the country's loveliest

'and most significant gardens, and the ideas and history that shaped them.

'I've seen the astonishingly grand gardens of Rome, made by cardinals

'vying for the papacy.'

That's enchanting.

'And discovered how the Renaissance made Florentine gardens into harmonious ordered works of art.'

Down there you can see a line of trees,

along here you can see a line of trees, along this access there's a line of trees.

'I'll also be visiting the playful baroque gardens of the North.'

Oh. Dead end. You got me.

Now have your wicked way.

'But this week, I'm in the South, where the gardens are mostly more informal, the planting more exotic,

'and I get a glimpse into the glamorous hideaways of the rich and famous.'

Keep out, unless you're invited you can't come in.

'I'll be discovering how an 18th century

'very English gardening movement utterly transformed Italian gardens.'

Ah, that's just lovely.

'And luxuriate in what's undoubtedly the most romantic garden ever made.'

And then up here on the bridge

you have one of the most stunning views in any garden, ever.

I'm basing myself in Naples for this southern leg of my tour.

It's a city that is a splendid tangle of anarchy, shabbiness

and real architectural magnificence.

Tourists have used Naples for centuries as a centre for exploring

the area's classical history and the dramatic landscape set on the glorious bay of Naples,

as well as the more rugged Amalfi coast, just a little further south.

I hardly know this area of the country at all, but I do know that many of the gardens of the region

are a radical contrast to most of the others I've seen elsewhere in Italy.

Most people still think of Italian gardens as all being formal,

symmetrical, straight lines and, above all, greenness.

But actually, in the south, particularly around Naples, that isn't the case.

There are an awful lot of gardens that are romantic and soft,

and I want to see as many as I can and find out why are these gardens different in this part of Italy.

The gardens I visited around Rome and Florence were often exuberant

and playful, but nature was always seen as something to be tamed and tightly controlled.

Here in the south, many gardens are comfortable with a wilder

and more romantic vision of the natural world,

matching the artistic freedom that the area inspired and nurtured.

And reaching its sublimest expression

in the garden created and in that the ruined medieval town of Ninfa.

There is, rather surprisingly, a strong English persuasion at work here,

and these very southern gardens have roots in the British landscape movement of the mid-18th century.

I'm starting my visits halfway between Rome and Naples, in the province of Latina,

by visiting a contemporary garden that wears its English influences proudly,

and which I have a slight personal link to.

Set around the ruins of a medieval castle,

Torrecchia belongs to the daughter of Prince Carlo Caracciolo,

the founder of the newspaper La Repubblica.

There is absolutely none of the sub-hotel formality

that can be the default position for many houses of the very rich.

Everything is slightly shaggy and gently overflowing with flower.

The form and geometry that we all associate with Italian gardens has been replaced by a sense

of careless abandon, as though nature could reclaim it all at any moment.

As someone who gardens in England, I can immediately

see familiarities - the softness, the lushness, the greenness.

But actually, as soon as you start to look closely,

there are all kinds of things that couldn't happen in England.

The quality of the light, for example, plant associations.

Put all those elements together and what you get is a garden that belongs to the place.

Torrecchia's very modern horticultural informality is the creation

of an Italian, Lauro Marchetti, and the British garden designer, Dan Pearson.

And today it's under the guidance of Stuart Barfoot,

who was Dan's assistant and worked for me in my garden 17 years ago.

This is the first time I've seen him at all those years.

We have this idea that Italian gardens are crisp and formal

and clipped. How do Italians feel in terms of letting things get loose?

Some Italians would have a problem with this garden, I think, and I have had, we have had guests come who

sort of look at the plants growing out of the cracks in the paving, and they've literally pulled them away.

-Rushing after them to stop them. "Leave my garden alone."

I had a very apologetic lady once who I stopped

and she said, "Oh, I thought I was helping you."

Although the plants might appear to grow untrammelled, self seeding themselves and spilling freely,

it's none the less a highly designed space.

What appears to be a jumble of flowers

actually follows a restrained and carefully controlled colour palate.

A lot of people will use a colour theme in a garden,

but to work most effectively you need to use three dimensions,

and in a big garden like this, of course, that can be done on a grand scale.

So in the foreground you can have mixed whites, and you get your little white garden.

But then here, the Philadelphus picks it up in the middle ground.

And right in the distance, climbing up a stone wall, is a white rose,

so that white just bounces away through the garden like an echo disappearing.

And it's very subtle but actually quite powerful.

The southern Italian climate means that there are combinations of plants that are familiar,

but which you would rarely get to flower simultaneously in Britain,

such as these foxgloves,

aquilegias and tobacco plants.

When Stuart arrived, he encouraged them to leave as much grass as possible to grow long,

just mowing paths where necessary.

And his latest addition to the garden is a wild flower meadow.

We sort of blitz this every autumn and we cut everything down, take it away, rotavate.

-So it's an annual meadow.

-It's an annual meadow, yeah, mainly corn chamomile,

cornflower and a few poppies.

Obviously, a bit of the garden like this will only look at its best for what, three weeks?

A few weeks, yeah. But we've got a luxury in that sense

because this space really wasn't being used and I thought, you know,

let's do something that looks really amazing and it doesn't matter if it looks amazing for only a few weeks.

-And how does this go down?

-People love it. Yeah.

-Do they? Oh, right, they don't think you're a barmy Englishman?

-No, most people love it, yeah.

Although Torrecchia was begun in 1992, this informal

style of gardening first appeared in southern Italy much earlier.

It goes back over 200 years, when the Bourbon dynasty ruled over what

was then Italy's largest kingdom, stretching from north of Naples right down to include Sicily.

This is Caserta.

It was begun in 1751 for Don Carlos VIII, King of Naples,

with the explicit aim of being the biggest and grandest garden in all Europe.

It's certainly enormous and very grand.

But it also contains one of the first examples of a new style

that was to revolutionise Italy's formal gardens.

By the time you've walked through the palace,

it's so impressive that you're in a state of submissive shock, really,

and then you come out into the light and the landscape,

and everything is funnelled down to this extraordinary vista, just narrowed down to a point.

And it's as though it takes your natural impulse to look out and forces it in.

And of course that's all about power. It's doing it because it can.

And it's just saying, you know, "Be amazed".

Well, you can't be anything else. It's amazing.

Whilst all your attention is focused towards the cascade, three kilometres away at the far end,

to get down there and visit all the garden is a walk of over eight kilometres.

So, I hire a bike to get around.

These high walls of trimmed trees and hedges around the bosco,

or ornamental woodland, are a regular feature in Italian gardens, but I never tire of them.

The view is so compelling and steers you on so much that it's easy to overlook how wonderful the bosco is.

And it's that combination of the clipped edge of the wood,

like a hedge, and then the trees spilling over the top that is deeply satisfying.

It's a lovely thing, a bosco.

This is the epitome of high Baroque and rococo design.

Dramatic, confident and elegant.

And with nature always firmly under control.

Do you know, I'm feeling quite excited about this.

When I came here, I'd seen pictures and it looked very static.

It had got this power statement.

"Here I am, I can do this, admire it, now push off."

It's not like that at all.

It unfolds, and it's progressive.

And as I'm cycling along there's a sense of a narrative,

and I'm part of it.

I'm not excluded.

The scale of the garden is simply breathtaking.

Just to bring the water into the canal and its fountains, Caserta's architect, Luigi Vanvitelli,

blasted through six hillsides and built a 33-kilometre-long aqueduct.

But this was a final flourish, because Caserta was the last

palatial garden to be built in Italy in the formal style.

It took 25 years to make, and by the time it was complete, gardens across Europe were being changed forever.

The strange thing was that in 1786,

just really little more than 10 years after the formal garden was finished,

it was out of date and a new garden was started.

And this new garden was exotic and absolutely the height of fashion,

and it was called the English Garden.

On a 50-acre plot, especially bought for the purpose, is a garden

as different in style to its predecessor as could be imagined.

It looks like nothing so much as an English country park.

The whole style was based around taking the elements

of the countryside and including them as part of the garden.

This new style was based on the landscape movement.

Rather than regulate nature in ordered ranks and lines, it set out to absorb and replicate it.

It actually takes as much control and as much skill to make things to look natural

as it does to make the garden look formal,

and one of the key things is parkland, where you have large

trees with grass underneath. But, of course, this is the baking south.

Grass doesn't grow easily, and the large trees are not the ones you'd normally expect to see in England.

I mean, I can see a huge Cork Oak, I think it is, and there are Cypresses, Stone Pines, palms.

None of the elements would you find in the average English garden, but the general feel

is certainly true to the type.

This type was begun by William Kent 50 years earlier and then made popular by Capability Brown,

and the new fashion transformed Britain's gardens before spreading across the continent.

Ironically, this style of gardening was based upon paintings

of imagined classical landscapes and was known as the picturesque.

As a result, classical temples and fake ruins became highly fashionable garden accessories.

To go down an overgrown path and come across a fully blown temple is a surprise,

which is absolutely in the spirit of the Picturesque style, which this garden is based on.

Whereas in a formal garden you see everything literally for miles,

and if you're going to have a temple, you put it on the top of a hill.

Whereas with the new style, everything is a moving tableau.

It's to delight you and surprise you or even horrify you, certainly to titivate you.

So to brush through the undergrowth and come across a temple as though

it's being lying there for years is exactly the required effect.

This English garden at Caserta is contemporary with the New Romantic Movement that took the frisson

of raw nature and celebrated it as a reaction to the industrialisation that was taking place.

In the process, the romantic poets such as Wordsworth,

Keats and Shelley created a new artistic language

that valued the imagination and emotions

as highly as the previous era had held rationality and the intellect.

This is a nympheum,

and any self-respecting English garden by the end of the 18th century had grottos

and places where hermits might stay, and they were meant to evoke a response in the visitor.

And, in fact, this is where the Picturesque moves into the Romantic period

where it's all about feelings rather than about thoughts.

This carried on right through the 19th century

and you'd have little places where you could wander.

Inside this rocky, rather wild place there is a statue...

Whoops! And a... Oh, look.

A complete...abandoned, lost piece of classical world,

but this is not a ruin that has evolved through time.

This has been manufactured to look ruined.

Look at these statues.

And what's a real shame is that the people that wander through now do seem, particularly around Naples,

to have a desire to leave their mark,

and nobody's stopping people do it, and no-one seems to clear it up. Maybe nobody minds.

The great discovery of the Renaissance was classicism,

with its humanism and order.

But a couple of hundred years later in the romantic garden,

classical civilisation is depicted as picturesque ruins,

designed to deliciously thrill you with a display of mortality and decay.

But not all the thrills of the garden are solemn.

I like that because there you have a nymph washing decorously, and from the front she's covering herself up.

But this is a peek at her bum and I like the sense of 'what the butler saw',

that she doesn't know we're here and we're spying on her.

The fashion for English landscape gardens lasted in Italy

until the neo- Renaissance revival in Florence at the beginning of the 20th century.

But the romantic influence remained particularly strong here in the south of the country,

attracting artists, writers and musicians to escape the restrictions of northern Europe.

And their influence in particular found its way into the gardens of the region.

I'm now heading to the coast,

for Sorrento on the far side of the Bay of Naples.

Today, it's a popular modern resort, but it's ancient,

and has been drawing of visitors here from all over the world for a very long time.

Since Roman times, people have been building villas and houses in Sorrento

because it's a lovely place. It's not hard to see why.

But it's also attracted people from quite far afield.

People come from northern Europe to this point because there's something

about the place that gives them creative freedom, whether they're painters

or artists or whatever, and I think it's because it's far enough south

that suddenly you're liberated from all the ties of the north, and that applies to gardens, too.

People have come from far afield to make gardens,

and the next garden I'm visiting is just here.

And because the view is so important,

the garden is right up there on the cliff top.

In the 18th century, which was the heyday of the Grand Tour, Naples was the southernmost

point in Italy for the young and noblemen seeking out the visible remains of Italy's classical past,

and eagerly taking on what entertainment they could on the way.

A Napoleonic wall's put a stop to that, but by the end

of the 19th century the area started attracting wealthy foreigners again,

who not only visited, but also began to make homes here.

This private garden is one such.

Although not open to the public, I'd been allowed in to take a look.

-Ooh!

-'Yes?'

-Hello, it's Monty Don.

-'Yes, the gate is open.'

-Whoops!

It is called Villa Il Tritone.

The 19th century villa was bought in 1905 by William Waldorf Astor -

the American ambassador in Rome before becoming a British citizen and eventually a viscount.

Astor enlarged the grounds and much of the existing garden was laid out by him.

He loved the place and used it as a very private retreat from public life.

A place where he could truly relax and be free.

It's interesting that this piece of the garden,

which is right by the house, so you'd expect it to be formal

and an Italian way to balance the architecture of the house.

It almost immediately gets fuzzy.

The plants are allowed to roam free and seed themselves where they will,

and then towards the end of the boundaries of this bit of the garden, it gets almost anarchic.

And I think that's the key to the whole garden.

It sort of bursts the constraints of the formal Italian garden, despite itself.

It can't help itself but be free.

Astor used Il Tritone's long history to make his garden.

There had been a Roman villa on this side, looking out across

the bay to Mount Versuvius and the town of Pompeii on the other side of the water.

But in that spectacular view laid the Venus de Milos.

When Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, burying the town of Pompeii on the other side of the bay,

the tsunami that followed the quake swept across and knocked the villa straight into the sea.

Remains and artefacts from the villa were recovered and Astor used them

when making his garden, but the result was anything but conventionally classical.

The overriding impression you get in this garden is of a greenness, a soft light coming through,

and in this central avenue you have this tunnel of green.

Most avenues are open to the sky, but this one, because it's closed over and with the Banksia

rose growing across the top, in fact you just get glimpses of the light.

They're like skylights.

I like the fact they've used wood and it's not some metal construction.

It's slightly wonky and accidental and that looks lovely.

It's soft, and yet there are avenues going out to other things.

There's an avenue going down there, and at the end you go down to light

and the sea, and look down there, the way this green path, which is just moss, and bright sea beyond it,

and it's designed in such a way as to make it seem much bigger than it is.

These avenues radiate out simply to make the most of the space.

In the early 1970s, the villa was bought by an Italian businessman - Mariano Pane and his wife Rita.

Then just in her early twenties with small children, Rita found herself the custodian of the garden,

although at the time, she wasn't fully aware of its historical significance.

Luckily, I was so young when we came that I was not intimidated

because otherwise, if I would have started now, of course I would feel intimidated.

But as it grew slowly,

I really absorbed the story of this garden, the past of this garden, the culture.

What's your philosophy, in terms of gardening?

My philosophy first of all is freedom.

I think that at the end, you cannot fight against nature and in the end nature will always win,

so I think you have to choose the right plants for the right place.

The spontaneous plant, they're so beautiful. You need to discover them.

They are not imposing themselves.

I like the idea of the romantic garden, the garden of the poets, modern, the garden of the architects.

Well, you've certainly achieved that, there's no doubt about it.

This is about as romantic as a garden can get.

William Waldorf Astor had commissioned

the English garden designer Harold Peter to create his garden,

and Peter build a wall, both as a screen to create privacy

and simultaneously to intensify the burrowed landscape.

I think this series of windows along the sea edge of the garden are a stroke of genius,

because you might think that with this dramatic and beautiful landscape

with the sea outside the garden, you want to have

access to as much of it as possible, but actually by blocking it out

and then revealing it in a carefully chosen series of framed pictures, you make it more precious.

And at the same time it keeps out the hurly-burly of the town below,

so you get the best of both worlds.

You get the landscape intensified and made more precious, AND you get increased seclusion.

Il Tritone is a green, green place.

Even the paths are thick with a peachy green fuzz of moss

and I couldn't resist slipping my shoes off to tread their delicious coolness.

Ooh, it feels nice.

It's attractive to see people doing things.

I reckon the key to this garden is in the way that it's an escape from life,

and think of who it was essentially made by, William Waldorf Astor,

an ambassador in Rome, a rich American,

beset all the time by the strangeness of the country,

by diplomacy, politics and then money and art,

and what that money bought him was a way of getting away from things when it got too much.

Too much sun, too much noise, too many other people he didn't want to be with.

And with creating a green retreat with windows out on to that world,

not only was it a kind of barrier and insulating there,

but a beautiful one. A beautiful bubble.

In the early years of the 20th century, the trickle of foreigners

buying homes here became a full flow,

as Europe's rail network made the Amalfi Coast,

just south of the Bay of Naples, a popular holiday destination.

These holiday-makers found an area that was a very poor

with the only living to be had from the sea or the ravishingly beautiful but harsh land.

The hillsides above the sea are still cultivated in a thousand layered terraces -

growing vegetables and fruit, but principally lemons, and the locals

proudly claim that the lemons of Amalfi are the best in the world.

I made a detour to visit Giovanni Ciuffi,

who's been growing them here for 50 years.

As you walk into the groves, every breath is zesty with lemon.

That smells so good.

SHE SPEAKS ITALIAN

Ooh, I just squirted myself in the face.

It's a...

It's a joy!

What makes them special? What is it about them?

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

Lemon not round, but long.

So if I want to grow lemons at home as good as yours, what is the secret?

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

You have to choose the right plant from Amalfi,

-and give it love.

-Amalfi and love!

-And love.

-OK.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

You come next year and he prepare a plant for you.

That's a date.

The poverty of this region meant that comparatively wealthy foreigners could buy

beautiful Italian estates for much less than their northern European counterparts.

I'm on my way now to see one such place, perched high up above the cliffs at Ravello.

Bought as a run-down farmhouse, it was transformed into a famous,

but very private retreat for a fascinatingly eclectic mix of celebrities.

You have to walk to get here. The streets get narrower and narrower.

No swooshing up in your Bentley and making a grand entrance.

But when you do get here,

the entrance itself is about as grand as it could be.

It's rather intimidating, actually, because it's like a castle.

The steps leading up, this great big door, the thick walls. Now, all that's saying is, "Keep out!"

Unless you're invited, you can't come in.

Villa Cimbrone was bought in 1904 by Ernest Beckett,

Second Baron Grimthorpe, who was a banker and a Tory politician.

Grimthorpe wasn't an especially great gardener, but he was a champion womaniser

and is said to of been the father of Violet Trefusis,

who famously became the lover of Vita Sackville-West.

Grimthorpe was a wealthy man, but he bought Villa Cimbrone for 100 lire,

which, in today's money, works out at the grand sum of just £300.

Hiring a local architect, Nicola Mansi,

Grimthorpe set about transforming the agricultural vineyard and walnut groves

into a grand, glamorous garden, with breathtaking views and vistas,

framed by a mix of temples, grottoes, balustrades and statues.

The wisteria is absolutely lovely.

What is a joy, and really the reason you come to Italy,

is here you've got all the freshness of these flowers,

weather that feels like the best English summer's day,

fantastic scenery, and it's sort of distilled into a garden.

Actually, what's interesting is to see a Judas tree,

pruned right hard and then breaking from the stem, so you get this floral stick, bright colour.

I'm not sure whether it's as good as just a normal tree, but it's certainly dramatic.

Grimthorpe died in 1917,

but his daughter Lucille enlarged the garden and made it the centre on the Amalfi coast for writers,

such as DH Lawrence and at the Bloomsbury set,

as well as musicians, politicians and film stars.

It was a place where the very famous could come and be glamorously private and uninhibited.

And it was here in 1938 that Greta Garbo,

the most famous film star of the age, holed up with her lover,

the conductor Leopold Stokowski,

and first issued her famous plea that she "wanted to be left alone".

That's a long walk for a garden.

There's sort of an element of a motorway about it

and it's a bit themeless.

But, actually, I get it now, because it's directing you down here.

It's saying, "Come on, get down here,"

because when you do get here, that's...

Well, it's a pretty scary view,

but it's just stunning, stunning, stunning!

And I suppose if you've got a view as dramatic as this,

then your garden is just funnelling the visitor,

you know, "Through the gate and get down the end and have a look,"

and it's stately, and the sky's blue, and it's just lovely in every way.

And as I was walking down, I was thinking about, you know, Greta Garbo coming here,

and if you want to be private, there's a sense of enclosure.

And yet this garden, you know, is dramatically open,

and standing on here feels a bit like a stage,

and if the public aren't allowed in,

you're completely private, but you can be seen.

And I think there's something about that with celebrity.

They WANT to be seen, they WANT to be noticed, but on their own terms.

And, of course, this garden does that absolutely through and through.

"Look at me, but from a distance."

The garden juts out on a finger of land high above the rocky slopes to the sea.

Magnificent stone pines and yew hedges grown anarchically free-form

provide shelter, as do the pergolas laden with wisteria.

It all creates a secluded, romantic setting,

yet the backdrop and buildings

are theatrical to the point of melodrama.

There's no doubt this is a lovely garden and certainly worth visiting.

It's such a dramatic location and the way that it's laid out is terribly theatrical,

which is an irony really, because when you think of the people that came here, the Greta Garbos

and the DH Lawrences and the Salvador Dalis and Churchills,

these are big, dramatic people, coming as an escape,

but actually, they've come as a performance,

and I think what would make this garden come alive would be a party.

If you have this as a location to have a great big bash,

the garden would join in, the setting would become absolutely perfect.

By the 1960s, the Amalfi coast was becoming increasingly a tourist resort,

and musicians, writers and artists

coming here for a cheap sunny retreat

had to travel further afield.

So, I'm now taking the ferry across the Bay of Naples

to the small volcanic island of Ischia, 15 miles from the mainland.

Nowadays, Ischia is a popular day trip for tourists who come

not just to enjoy the island's beaches, but to visit a world-famous garden.

But as recently as 50 years ago, the island was remote, with no mains electricity or water,

and it was 60 years ago that a young woman in her 20s came here and began to create a remarkable garden.

Hello?

Immediately you enter the garden, you're struck by the lushness of the planting...

..which is flagrantly tropical!

Which is something of a culture shock on this bone-dry Mediterranean island.

La Mortella is the life's work of the Argentinian Susana Walton,

who married the enormously successful English composer

Sir William Walton when she was just 22.

Looking to escape the English winter,

they rented a house Ischia in 1949, neither of them ever having been there before,

and fell in love with the island,

deciding that it was the ideal place for Sir William to compose in peace.

They bought the land for the garden in 1956.

It was an old quarry with no water supply,

but Susana, an instinctive plants woman, was undaunted,

and started planting straightaway with exuberant enthusiasm.

Following her instincts, she selected exotic plants

from around the world and against all the odds, the garden quickly flourished.

It's interesting that Ischia, with its volcanic rock and its heat and its moisture, is so conducive

to things growing fast, so you get this dramatic response, and the show is operatic.

There's drama, there's colour, there's bigness, there's flamboyance,

and you can't really have that in the north.

It's to do with the south, and you needed someone from Argentina

with Latin in her soul to make that come alive.

From the first, it was a major undertaking.

Russell Page, the pre-eminent English garden designer of the day, created the layout of the garden

and the landscape was on a heroic scale. Terraces were cut into the volcanic rock.

75 lorryloads of topsoil were poured into the ravine

and huge cisterns for irrigation were filled with water, shipped in by tanker from the mainland.

As the trees grew, it created a benign microclimate,

which allowed Susana to create a subtropical garden with plants from all over the world,

where bromeliads happily rubbed shoulders with slipper orchids

beneath a canopy of tree ferns and palms.

La Mortella's head gardener, Alessandra Vinciguerra, came to Ischia in 1997

and worked with Susana until her death in March 2010.

From the start, the choice of plants was hers and this is why it is so tropical.

She liked bold plants, she liked colours,

she liked the plants that came from Argentina,

plants that were different from what you would find in gardens

at that time in this area.

And when Susana saw a plant she liked, she HAD to have it and would go to extraordinary lengths

to bring it back to La Mortella, as the story behind

this huge silk floss tree, Chorisia speciosa, displays.

That was planted by Lady Walton in 1983 from a seed that she took in Buenos Aires.

She went there for a concert and she noticed there were some chorisias growing there, so anyhow,

she climbed on top of a taxi and picked one of the fruits,

and from that fruit, from that tree, came that plant.

This story seems to have been entirely typical of her way of living and gardening,

and that energy and vivacity runs like electricity through the garden.

It is a performance.

A garden wearing a stylish hat and a brilliant smile whilst talking 19-to-the-dozen!

It is a very passionate garden. It's full of life,

compared to the typical, formal, historical Italian garden that people sometimes don't understand.

This one is understood or is loved by everybody.

Above the subtropical tree line, on the exposed old quarry walls,

the garden transcends its recent history and becomes rooted deep in place.

Although this garden is PACKED with plants, a lot of them unusual,

I have to say, none are nicer than the Mediterranean natives like this rosemary,

prostrate, drooping down the hillside.

It's beautiful.

And the cistus, and the myrtle, and of course La Mortella is taken from the name "myrtle".

These are native plants, as common as anything you'll find in the whole Mediterranean,

but they absolutely look right at home.

This is where they live,

so they're comfy.

The garden is an expression of one remarkable woman's flamboyance and deep passion for plants.

It sings with energy and colour.

But the garden began and ends as a testament to the love of Susana

for her husband William, who died in 1983.

High up above the quarry, she created a monument overlooking his favourite view.

Here is the rock which is the memorial to William Walton.

His ashes are underneath here.

But I think the real memorial is the garden itself.

It's a memorial to both of them, William and Susana,

and although Russell Page is always credited with designing the garden,

which obviously he did, that was his job, but the thing that brought it to life was Susana's planting.

And I read that she quoted the famous remark that you consult the genius of the place to inspire you.

The genius of the place is the love.

If you like, the whole garden is a monument to them and their love for each other.

I headed back from the calm of Ischia to the chaotic streets of Naples.

The overcrowded city seems to be spreading in an unregulated, predatory way,

swallowing in its path scores of small farms

on the outskirts that, for centuries, have supplied the city.

There are now only a few survivors farming high on the slopes

of an extinct volcano where it is too steep to build.

Taking me to meet one of these last-remaining semi-urban farmers is the writer and campaigner

Bruno Brillante.

-Hello, how are you?

-Nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you. Bruno.

Well, it's lovely to be here, but tell me what is special about this place?

What makes it different to others?

Because this is one of the last places where you can find the original farmers.

They still work in the traditional way.

No pollution, no chemical, and you can find the flowers and plants that you cannot find in other places.

-Pepino!

-'Pepino Polverino farms ten acres of land on the hillside

'behind his house, where he grows superb fruit and vegetables.'

-Pepino.

-Nice to meet you.

These are fantastic. Look at that.

Lemon from this place.

-You grow these?

-Yes.

Beautiful. And look at all this. And all this grown on the land here?

Those are broad beans. Wow.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

It's beetroot.

-You will try after...

-Good. OK.

-Very fresh.

-Very fresh.

-I can't wait.

-Taste that.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

-It's very good.

-Bueno.

Bueno. All this is harvested this season?

Only fresh, and only seasons.

So just up here?

'Although almost sheer in places, the land on the slopes

'has been worked for at least 300 years, but Pepino is one of the last remaining growers here.'

You won't get any machinery up here.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

He come with the tractors.

Gosh, if he brings his tractor up here, he's a braver man than I!

-So the soil here, what is the soil like?

-Volcanic.

-Volcanic soil, so very fertile.

-Si, very fertile.

I have visited a lot of allotments in my time, but this is certainly the steepest.

The city is right there, isn't it?

-Yes. Just...

-Right there, and there is Vesuvius.

And how do you feel when you look out?

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

Fortunately, it has now stopped.

Only 20 years ago, there were fields of orange and lemon trees, cherry tree.

'Is seems depressingly likely Pepino's land will sooner or later also disappear

'under the remorseless, lava-like flow of urbanisation.'

-Beans, plums, apricots, you know each individual plant.

-Si.

Although the spread of Naples is eroding these allotments

and market gardens, Pepino's land is no quasi-rural affectation. It is the real thing,

And a perfect model for small urban farms of the future.

This feels like a garden, even though it's ten acres of intensive veg, you could say.

The fact that it's loved and cared for as much as any garden of any description, I think does the trick.

There is that kind of human magic that works, and it's been going on here for 200 years,

but I wonder, really, how long this can last.

There's Naples encroaching in, like an angry sea, and it would be a real shame if I were to come back here

in 20 years' time and find that where I'm sitting now is a block of flats.

Pepino wouldn't let me leave without sharing a meal with his family,

every scrap grown and harvested from his ten acres.

Here, at the table, is the real heart and soul of Italian gardening.

-This is your wine?

-Yes.

-So everything here is made by Pepino?

-The wine too.

-The wine too.

-OK.

-To your very good health.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

Naples is very different from the rest of Italy and so are its gardens,

that have evolved over the past 200 years to become looser, softer

and more obviously romantic than its northern Renaissance counterparts.

But there is one garden here left to visit in the south

that is not just more romantic than any other that I have EVER visited

but simply one of the loveliest, most magical gardens of any kind anywhere in the world.

I'm travelling 120 miles north of Naples

to the hilltop town of Sermoneta that lies above the marshy plain

in which is set the gardens of Ninfa.

When people discover that I've visited a lot of gardens, they suggest ones

that I haven't been to, and a name that has cropped up over the years more than any other is Ninfa.

So last year, I did go and see it, and I was staggered.

It is just simply gorgeous.

And whilst, of course, there's great debate about which is the most beautiful garden in the world,

there's no doubt which is the most romantic.

For 1,000 years, Ninfa was an important town on the main road between Naples and Rome.

At its early-14th-century peak, before the Black Death

ripped through Europe, it was owned by the Caetani family and had a castle,

seven churches, 14 towers,

a town hall, mills, 150 houses and around 2,000 inhabitants,

all of which made it a substantial town.

Then, disaster struck.

In 1381, Ninfa was sacked by mercenaries and pillaged by neighbouring towns.

The remaining inhabitants, much reduced by plague

and riddled with malaria from the surrounding marshes, evacuated it for healthier, safer ground.

The Caetani family retained ownership, but for nearly six centuries,

it lay abandoned, with the buildings submerged like sunken wrecks beneath the tangled undergrowth.

This is a town where people lived for hundreds and hundreds of years,

where people died by the hundred,

and there are ghosts in here.

You're walking the streets

where Romans walked, where medieval man, where people fought,

and there are just layers upon layers of memories

in amongst the buildings, just like there are layers upon layers of plants.

You don't want to speak too loudly,

not because you're disturbing other people, but you don't want to disturb your own sensitivity.

Ninfa was not wholly ignored.

Visitors came to admire its melancholy decay and the nonsense writer and painter Edward Lear

described it in 1840 as "one of the most romantic visions in Italy".

The transformation into a garden began in 1905, under the guidance of Prince Gelasio Caetani.

Gelasio took on the enormous task of clearing the buildings from the undergrowth.

But the garden as we see it now was started by his sister-in-law,

Marguerite, who planted on a grand scale.

And her daughter Lelia expanded Ninfa into its modern state after the Second World War.

In medieval times, they repeatedly would get plague,

and this was a low-lying area, so there was lots of malaria,

and the town would be isolated from time to time.

And to get food in, it had to come by the river,

but they couldn't come right through,

so this bridge was adapted to cater for that eventuality.

And if you come up here...

You can see that they built into the bridge -

and these are the town walls, so this is the edge of the boundary -

no-one could go out, no-one could come in.

But they built, in the bridge, these vents, these openings,

and what they did was lower baskets down on ropes

to boats that would come from nearby with supplies.

And then up here on the bridge,

from the edge of the town looking in...

..you have one of the most stunning views in any garden, ever,

in the world.

The way that Ninfa is maintained is a brilliant balancing act.

Preserving the picturesque sense of ruin and loss with great subtlety,

whilst scrupulously maintaining the fabric of the place.

I've gone off-piste a bit. If you visit the garden, you go on a set route

and admire all the obvious best bits, but I like it if you can get behind the scenes a little bit.

The whole place is gardened really carefully, and in fact,

all this, I know, is very carefully assessed and considered.

You know, how much weed do you leave in it?

They don't want it looking too spick-and-span,

and that would lose that sense of history, but on the other hand,

they don't want to damage the fabric of the buildings, and it's all carefully weeded and selected

and looked after, and what you get are these layers of perception.

It's as though history's mulching the garden.

Now, as I was talking to you just then, I looked up and there,

in the oak tree, is the most beautiful rose.

Ah, that's just lovely.

I think that the secret of Ninfa, as perhaps with all truly great gardens, is that it enlarges us.

You go in to admire and enjoy, which of course you do, but you come out

with a whole new set of parameters with which to measure life.

It really is that good.

It may well be that there are bits of Ninfa that you think could be improved or bits you don't like,

but, for my money, and I have visited an awful lot of gardens,

this garden encapsulates the performance of a garden,

the idea of a garden, better than anywhere else.

And that's a result of this extraordinary partnership between

1,000 years of history of mankind,

and the creativity of plants, nature renewing itself all the time,

of people nurturing it and responding to it, that can make a garden into high art,

and I think that, where you have man making something beautiful in partnership with nature,

then it becomes something completely life-enhancing.

These gardens that I have visited in the south have a very distinct character.

They're quite different from the rest of the country.

The combination of bright sunshine, a sense of freedom of expression,

and a simpler way of life

has been the inspiration for gardens of a more liberated, looser spirit,

than I have seen anywhere else in Italy so far.

Next time, I'll be in the Veneto and the lakes of the far north,

visiting gardens rich with plants,

as well as looking in on the gardens of the very rich and the very famous.

-What's this one here?

-Mr Clooney's place.

-Yeah, I can see why he might want to live there.

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