The Veneto, Lucca and The Lakes Monty Don's Italian Gardens

I am on the final leg of my journey through Italy,

exploring the country's loveliest and most significant gardens

and the ideas and history that shaped them.

I have visited gardens that defy interpretation.

It's like a child going, "Grrrr!"

And I've seen others whose message couldn't be clearer.

I've seen how the formality of the Renaissance was replaced

by a much more natural, romantic style in the south.

Oh, it feels nice.

This time, I'm in the wealthy north, where the profits of trade were spent on making

elaborate gardens, which became pleasure grounds for gentry at play.

Oh, dead end. You've got me. Now have your wicked way!

I'll discover how newly-introduced species helped lay the foundations

of botany and medicine in Italy.

And see how this influx of plants from across the world

created gardens of high theatre.

Fantastic!

The north is by far the wealthiest part of Italy.

500 years ago, it was one of the richest and most powerful regions in Europe,

with highly productive agricultural land

and well-established commercial links across the world.

The north of Italy is where most of the trade has taken place from early times.

And a lot of that trade has been in plants, particularly in the 16th and 17th century

where they poured in from all over the world.

They were studied extensively for their medical use,

agricultural possibilities and, of course, just their beauty.

So I shall be looking in particular in this trip at how plants,

rather than politics or design, have shaped their gardens.

The influences that helped define the gardens in the north

were quite different to the rest of Italy

and they take us from the 16th century right up to the present day.

The principle garden makers of the Veneto and of Lucca

were the hugely prosperous merchants.

And their creations celebrate their own existence with undisguised pleasure.

Further north, the lakes provide a dramatic setting

and a benign microclimate to display collections of plants from all over the world.

From the early medieval period,

the crucial centre of Northern Italy's wealth was the independent Republic of Venice.

As Europe's most important trading hub,

Venice dominated the critical trade routes to the East for hundreds of years.

Ships brought back fabulously valuable silks, gold and spices,

and, from the early 16th century, goods and treasures also began to come in from the Americas.

Merchants and sailors returned with unfamiliar plants and fruits

from as far away as China and Chile.

Including wildly exotic plants,

such as the potato

and the tomato.

-Grazie.

-Prego.

-Grazie.

It seems extraordinary to us now,

when we take tomatoes for granted, but when they came in,

they were regarded as this extraordinary plant which had

these slightly suspicious-looking fruits which no-one dreamed of eating.

They assumed they were poisonous.

It was ages before someone plucked up the courage and popped them in their mouth.

And, of course, now, everywhere in Italy lives off tomatoes.

I am in Padua, 50 kilometres inland from Venice,

in the wealthy hinterland of the Venetian republic,

known as the Veneto.

Venice has always been the dominant city of the region,

but the most significant garden was made here in Padua.

The Orto Botanico, made in 1543 as part of Padua University,

is thought to be the world's oldest botanical garden.

Initially, it was set up to study and collect "simples",

which is the description which was then given to medicinal plants.

The original garden lies behind this beautiful circular wall.

But when it was first laid out, the wall wasn't there.

And people very quickly cottoned on to the fact that these plants

that they were laying in the beds, were potentially enormously valuable.

They were medicinal plants, so if a cure could be found,

somebody was going to get very rich indeed.

So people came in and then nicked them and flogged them at great profit.

So they put up the wall, so, what you've got to see is, actually, it's a fortress

and the purpose of the wall is to keep people out.

At the same time that art and architecture were being transformed in Renaissance Florence,

scientists were laying the foundations of modern botany in Padua.

The Orto Botanico was dedicated to studying the properties

of newly-introduced as well as indigenous plants,

so that they could be used safely and effectively.

This was revolutionary, because up to that point,

plant-based remedies had largely relied on superstition and folklore.

Most medicine was based on the doctrine of signatories

which basically meant that if a plant looked like an aspect of the human body,

then it would cure it.

So, for example, a walnut - it looks like a brain,

so it was used to try and cure diseases of the brain,

or Pulmonaria, lungwort that we grow, was used for lung diseases.

In practice, that killed as many people as it cured.

The whole point of the Renaissance was to explore and discover

and apply the mind to science.

So by 1533, when the Chair of Botany was set up here in Padua,

they wanted to collect as many plants as possible,

not just say, "It looks as though it will do this", but to find out.

The head of the Orto Botanico, Professor Francesco Bonafede,

realised that the first step towards understanding medicinal plants

was to identify and classify each specimen accurately.

You know, it's really strange,

because this is fundamentally a filing system.

It's a laboratory, and there is no attempt to make a beautiful garden,

the important thing is the order and the sequence

and the display of plants so they can be studied. And yet,

there's a magic here, there's a real charm.

You walk in and you're seduced, it feels wonderful,

it's the most beautiful garden.

I know I'm biased, of course. Of course I'm bound to love it,

but I defy anybody not to feel that magic.

As new plants came in, they were given a specific position

in an elaborate network of borders.

To learn how it works, I met the former prefect,

Professor Elsa Cappalletti.

This book was the first exercise book for students,

it was a pocket book,

in which there was the plan of the garden.

-So this is the plan of the garden here.

-With the four squares.

Yes.

In the past, students had to identify plants

only observing their shape, the flowers and so on.

And then they had to write the correct name of the plant.

-Oh, I see.

-The identity. Perhaps there was a bella donna.

-OK.

-And they had to write,

"bella donna".

So if they knew which bed the plant was in,

-then they would know which plant it was?

-Yes, yes.

So the pattern was, if you like,

-an aide to memory as much as anything else?

-Yes, yes.

It may be a simple system compared to our electronic wizardry,

but actually, it's beautifully effective because you can see how, if a student

who had studied here, came across a plant in the field, perhaps on the other side of the world,

wasn't quite sure what it was, but they vaguely remembered it,

all they had to do was think back to where they'd seen it in this garden, which particular bed.

And because each bed only had one plant, they'd hone in on that,

look up in their book, bed number 36, block number two - bingo,

they've got the name.

The 16th century saw an increasing flow of new arrivals.

The very first foreign plant introduced into the garden

was in 1561, and was the Agave from Mexico,

where it was prized by the Mayans for its wound-healing properties.

The oldest surviving plant in the garden

is the Mediterranean fan palm, Chamaerops humilis.

This is the original specimen, that has been growing here since 1585.

It's hard to exaggerate the importance of this garden.

There were other botanic gardens around the same time,

the one in Pisa was just about the same period,

but this was where the study of plants really took on importance.

And that appreciation of plants first of all as an aide to medicine

and then as an end in itself, was slowly,

but inexorably shaping the way that we viewed our gardens.

As well as studying medical plants,

the botanical garden in Padua played an important role in testing out

the cultivation of newly introduced agricultural species

that were to prove essential to feed the growing population.

I'm now taking a boat trip along the canal that connects Padua to Venice.

And perhaps more importantly,

links Venice to the agricultural interior of the Veneto.

Today, this is a charmingly gentle escape from the modern hurly-burly.

But in the 16th century it would have been the quickest way

to come inland and used regularly by the Venetian merchants and nobility,

who were buying land in the region and building summer villas.

These agricultural entrepreneurs planted the new crops

like maize that had arrived from the Americas

and immediately they thrived and proved highly profitable.

This is the Brenta Canal, and very quickly it became the main route

between Venice and Padua, and a lot of trade went up and down it.

And also it was used by the merchants to get to their holiday homes,

which they had built along the banks of the canal.

Particularly at Stra which had very good soil.

Those little farms that they first had became big estates

and then finally really rather grand villas.

And the place I'm going to visit now is the grandest of them all.

The wealthy merchants and their guests would have been

transported here to Stra in great style,

travelling from their Venetian palazzo

in a luxurious hybrid of gondola and barge known as a burchiello.

I arrive at my destination just as they would have done,

although in slightly less style,

at the grandest holiday home in the Veneto, Villa Pisani.

The Pisani family were Venetian bankers

and merchants that had been wealthy and powerful since the 14th century.

Villa Pisani started as a late 16th century farmhouse,

but in 1720 it was pulled down to build a grand country palace

where the Pisani family could entertain during the summer months.

Look at that. You could set the scene, can't you?

These visitors would come down the Brenta in a glorious barge,

they'd get out, they'd see this enormous building,

the biggest and the best in the area and be suitably impressed,

come into it, it's all rather magnificent.

And they pushed the doors and then boom,

it expands beyond anything they've ever seen before.

That's it, they've won. Pisanis have bowled them over.

Alvise Pisani had been the Venetian Ambassador

at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles

and wanted his new garden at Stra to emulate that of the Sun King.

But whereas Versailles stretched for 250 acres,

Pisani had just 10 to play with.

It's very grand, there are a number of these avenues that arrive

at gates and it's a trick that was used actually a lot in gardens

in the 18th century, these eye-catchers that draw the eye out of the garden.

Cos the gardens here are obviously grand, but they're not that big.

What you see is all there is.

So by cutting through the woods and then arriving at this gate or gap

in the fence, what it makes it feel is much bigger than it actually is.

So the guests would come here,

see it and feel as though it was owning as far as the eye could see.

As with all Baroque gardens, the intention was to delight,

amaze, surprise and entertain, as well as parade the owner's wealth

and power in a triumphant display of mastery over nature.

When you look on this from the entrance, it's absolutely magnificent.

And it's pretty magnificent when you get here,

but that's the road right there.

It's about 10 metres thick and there's nothing here.

It's built just for show, just to impress you, which is fine,

cos it does.

But this vast palace was only ever intended for the summer season.

It was a place of play rather than work

and life for a wealthy Venetian in the mid-18th century involved

a very great deal of glamorous, not to say, amorous play.

And the maze which was the first thing

to be planted in the garden, was the perfect playground.

I do like a nice, crisp hedge.

The thing about a maze is just sort of a hedge lover's delight.

Right, let's go in.

-HE SNIFFS

-Love the smell of box.

This was planted in 1720 and it's remained pretty much the same,

other than the change of hornbeam for box.

But very different to the labyrinths that you got in mediaeval gardens,

because in a labyrinth, we'd be wandering along here

and I'd be composing myself

and solemnly thinking about the tortuous route of life.

Let's go this way. But by 1720, it'd become a game.

So what you've got to imagine is people in lovely, great silk dresses

and tricorn hats, and it was all flirty,

so it was round the corner and you'd try and find me and chase me

and all sorts of malarkey going on in the maze.

And that's really the spirit of Pisani.

Now. Left, I think.

I can't see over the top.

Ah, I'm getting near.

Aha!

Oh, dead end.

That is deeply frustrating. Oh, well.

I have a feeling...

Oh, there's a cul-de-sac. I am actually genuinely lost.

HE LAUGHS

I don't know, we'll get out somehow.

I think the secret of a good maze is there has to be

a genuine sense of panic.

And there's all sorts of recorded stories,

particularly of grand tours, Englishmen who'd come and visit

mazes in the 18th century and then get lost and be calling for help

and these dreadful Italians wouldn't come and let them out.

Probably delighted to keep the English lords shut away for a bit.

Oh, dead end, you've got me.

Now have your wicked way.

Aha! Bull's-eye.

Whilst the central tower would be a remarkably unapproachable place

for a secret assignation, nowadays it serves only

as a viewing platform, presided over by a decidedly unromantic guard.

The thing about a maze, it's almost the ultimate sort of pleasing object.

But of course as a gardener I think,

"Blimey, can you imagine clipping that? And then collecting it all up,

"and also the problem of letting light into it,

"so it stays nice and thick."

I doubt the Pisanis' sportive 18th century guests

would have troubled over such things.

However they might well have found their way to the coffee house

to cool down after so much amorous excitement.

This arcaded pavilion sits on a mound housing an ice house,

which in winter was filled with blocks of ice cut from the moat that rings it.

Right through summer the deliciously chilled air would waft

upstairs into the building.

Oh, yes, there's the vent, the open space,

connecting to the cool air from the ice.

So you'd sit up here with your great big frocks with cold air

coming up underneath them, feeling elegant but cool.

Sometimes it's easy to feel a bit overwhelmed by all the symbolism

and allegory and metaphor that you get in Renaissance and Baroque gardens.

But this garden is dead simple, it's just one message that counts

and from the very beginning the Pisani brothers intended it

to impress, and it's worked through the ages.

Napoleon came along, saw it, loved it, bought it,

stayed one night, dished it out to a member of his family.

The Tsar of Russia chose to stay here above all the other places

that he could have had in the Veneto.

The Hapsburgs put their court here.

And, to this day, every single person that walks through that door

comes in, has a look and goes, "Wow".

I'm leaving the Veneto to take a detour southwest to Lucca -

once an independent city state,

and another wealthy centre of trade and agriculture.

I'm coming to visit a garden that was built on the proceeds

of a very specialised, very local product.

The reason why I'm making this journey to Lucca is that

it shares lots of similarities with the Veneto,

because it's an independent state

that had a lot of wealth, but it was tiny.

Despite this, it had its own ambassadors to the court

of St Petersburg and Versailles

and that wealth was based on two sources.

One was banking and the other was silk.

Today, visitors come to Lucca to admire its mediaeval architecture.

It is a calm, beautifully-preserved town.

But its history is founded on hard trade.

800 years ago, Lucca led the world in silk production

and pioneered new spinning technology.

Lucca's silk merchants such as Giovanni Arnolfini,

seen here in the famous painting by Jan van Eyck,

grew enormously rich on the trade

of the finest silks and silk velvets.

These merchants built themselves summer houses outside the city.

And by the middle of the 17th century, these villas in the hills

increasingly sported superb gardens.

In 1651, one of Lucca's wealthiest silk merchants of all bought himself

the title of Count Orsetti and built this stupendous villa and garden.

But despite the newly noble Count Orsetti's wealth,

and despite the opulence of his gardens,

the villas of these Lucchesi merchants were still

essentially highly-productive farms, and they all shared the same layout.

They're all north-south, they all have their good

cereal ground below, going down, sweeping down gently in a slope.

Behind them they had their olive trees and their orchards

and their woods, and then right in front of the house

and to the side they grew vegetables. It was a format they all followed,

and in the middle of the farmhouse, they all have one big room

with windows to the front and the back

so they could look out on their land, because it's all about money.

But in the kernel of all these places, they're working farmhouses.

Villa Marlia, then known as Villa Orsetti,

follows the Baroque fashion for a series of garden rooms,

each designed to surprise, delight and entertain the visitor.

But nothing delights or entertains me more than these breathtaking hedges.

That is fantastic.

Incredible canyon created by the hedges and the path.

It's an unlikely comparison, but it's exactly the same impression

you get when you first go to New York

and these enormous buildings

flanking the street and it changes the way that you view a street...

or, here, a garden path.

If you look at the trees, they're full-blown oak trees,

clipped to hedge form.

You see, for me this is worth crossing the world just to see this.

Last for the rest of my life.

The language of Baroque symbolism

and allegory would have been readily understood by all educated Europeans

of the period, which was essentially the 17th and 18th centuries.

So I have seen a number of similar river gods to these in the pool

and the citrus garden in other gardens around Rome and Caprarola.

I've seen quite a few citrus gardens now,

but I think this is my favourite.

I love it.

Just trying to work out what it is and I think the rhythm

is important, you have the balustrades playing along

and then the pots equally spaced and the colour of the lemons.

And it's like a sort of Baroque fugue that's picked up and played on.

But it's very practical - they would have sold the lemons

and, you know, they're Luccans, they're merchants,

and this is based upon an agricultural background,

so you grow lemons and you sell them and it's a harvest

and the water was for growing fish, if you like, it's a fish tank.

And it fed them. So the beauty is always practical.

Marlia, like all the gardens of the Italian Baroque,

was a place of performance and display.

And perhaps that is the central key to understanding all the great

Italian gardens throughout history.

And here at Marlia there is a perfectly preserved

teatro di verdura - a theatre created entirely from topiary.

This is terrific.

This great building made out of yew and a little bit of box.

And I know that it was really used, it's a real theatre,

it's not a topiary-pretend theatre.

They had performances here and there is backstage

and seats probably sat here.

And you could imagine those wonderful ladies with their enormous

great silk dresses, local silk, I suspect, sweeping in,

and you can get... Whoops, be careful on there.

I come up here, getting soaked.

I suppose this is the upper circle.

Yes, in here, we've got backstage area.

And I bet this is wonderfully cool in summer.

And here we've the wings with all the different entrances.

So we come through onto the stage and make my entrance.

Da-nah!

The terracotta statues date from 1700

and represent the stock characters from the commedia dell'arte.

These plays were frequently bawdy in tone and dramatised

stock themes such as adultery, love and the futility of old age.

And I have to say, it's just completely fabulous

and I want one in my garden and I want it now.

For Count Orsetti and his descendants, parties and plays

continued at Villa Marlia right up to the end of the 18th century.

Then their world collapsed.

In 1796, Napoleon Bonaparte crossed the Alps

and swept through northern Italy.

His army captured Venice, ending 1,100 years of independence,

and in 1799 took Lucca.

The opening lines of Tolstoy's War And Peace are, roughly,

"Well, prince,

"I see that Lucca and Genoa are now just estates of the Bonaparte family."

And that was based on what happened here,

because in 1805, Napoleon, dishing out provinces

like the gangster chief he was, gave to his sister the state of Lucca.

And she came down, had a look and decided that this villa,

which was then called Villa Orsetti,

was where she wanted to base herself.

And she more or less turfed out the owners - she did pay them

and gave them an offer they couldn't refuse.

And the count, Count Orsetti, in his fury and fear, I suspect,

had her silver money melted down, made into a huge dinner service,

which he then put on a cart and trundled

across the front of the villa

so that Elisa could see Marlia disappear.

It might have made him feel better,

but it didn't get him his house back.

And Elisa turned her back on his baroque formality,

and created instead an English landscape garden.

Its much more natural, informal style was then sweeping

the continent and made greater use of imported plants and trees.

Although the changes that Elisa made here were highly fashionable

at the time, actually, gardening was changing in a very profound way.

And it was because new plants were pouring in from all over the world.

And up till the 19th century, in Italy at least, architects

and landscape designers controlled the way that gardens looked.

But with this new material it was plants themselves became

the most interesting thing.

And we go from the age of the formal designer to the age of the plantsman.

I'm now heading north to an area where plantsmen made perhaps

the biggest impact on the country's gardens, the Italian lakes, which

lie up on the country's mountainous border with Switzerland and France.

This is Lake Como, where the freshly kindled 19th-century

passion for plants combined with a surge of new exotic species

to create some spectacular gardens.

The dramatic alpine setting, purity of the air

and the clarity of the light, all combine to make this area feel

distinctly different to the rest of Italy.

In the early 19th century, it certainly chimed with the new romantic movement,

and inspired poets such as Shelley and Wordsworth

and composers like Verdi and Liszt.

And at the same time in the early 1800s,

Como's shores were being transformed

as wealthy Italians queued up to build lakeside villas.

-I'm taking a boat trip along Lake Como with Judith Wade.

-Hello.

'Judith founded the Grandi Giardini Italiani which has helped

'and coordinated scores of Italy's finest historic gardens

'to open to the public.'

They are incredibly splendid villas.

Very ornate, all the gardens of course are waterfront

and have been designed so that you can appreciate them

from the waterfront rather than from the back of the city.

There are dozens of very impressive villas, aren't there?

Just one after the other, all the way along.

-I think there are more than 100.

-Really? Really?

'In recent years, many of Como's lavish villas have been bought

'by oligarchs, film stars and super-rich fashion designers.'

-This used to belong to Versace and...

-This one here?

Yes, and that's where...

And does the garden run all the way down?

-All the way down here.

-Marvellous garden.

And I believe that Madonna and Shakira

and all the people in the pop world would turn up here often.

So what's this one here?

Mr Clooney's place.

-Ah, very beautiful, yes, I could see why he might want to live there.

-Yes.

This is Mr Branson's home, it's rather particular,

very beautifully kept.

-Yes.

-Almost groomed.

And Mr Branson can only fly in here or come in here by boat,

because it has no access by road.

-It is immaculately kept, isn't it?

-And beautifully clipped Cyprus trees.

Does he spend much time there?

-I really don't know, he's never invited me over, but...

-Has he not?

-How rude.

-Ha-ha!

-How appalling.

And now we're coming along to Balbianello, but this is on a slope,

so you couldn't make a proper Italian garden. Well, you come in here,

you can look up the slope and it looks as though it is a garden.

There is a lot of topiary there. It's beautifully groomed and clipped.

They take four months, just two men,

who've been there for the last 30 years, they're the same.

-Do you know they use scissors on it?

-Do they? Ha-ha!

In the early 19th century when many of these villas and their gardens

were made, there was a burgeoning of colonial expansion and trade,

which, in turn, created and fuelled a craze for exotic new plants,

both from the east and the Americas.

The climate of the lakes, with its high rainfall, hot summers

and surprisingly mild winters, was perfect for the new arrivals.

Everybody has lovely glass houses because they were plant collectors.

So they were bringing plants in,

I mean, that was quite a new thing, wasn't it?

-That was the fashion way through Europe at the time.

-Yes, yes.

It was your status symbol - it wasn't having a Ferrari,

it was buying rare plants.

And then of course when Napoleon turned up of course there was

a lot of boats going round Europe bringing plants in and out -

that was an exciting part, he was going to exotic parts of the world.

And so with the mild climate and ericaceous soil they could have plants from the Himalayas

or China or wherever.

-Goodbye, have a nice day.

-Thank you very much indeed.

'On the shore of the little village of Bellagio is Villa Melzi,

which is one of Lake Como's finest gardens.

At the turn of the 19th century, this garden started a bitter

horticultural rivalry between two of Italy's most prominent men.

Melzi was the home of Francesco Melzi d'Eril, a Milanese aristocrat

who Napoleon appointed vice president of Italy after the French invasion.

In 1808 he began to make his garden in the new English landscape style,

and from the first it was open to views of the lake

and the mountains beyond.

However, like all natural-looking gardens, this involved huge work

to make and needs intensive maintenance to keep looking natural.

When you first walk round the garden it seems to just sort of be

rather soft and like a country park.

But when you analyse it the design has got really particular and strong elements.

For a start, you've got this steep slope,

tied together by the immaculate grass and these sculpted rather

abstract forms both of the shape of the land and also the shrubs.

And then there's trees growing up which give it some verticals.

And then you have this path,

this great long path just running the whole length of the garden

and the series of the plane trees, open to the lake.

And it's a vast plane, this great horizontal expanse,

which sets it all into balance.

And I don't think that first part, the soft, abstract, sculptural bit,

would work nearly so well without the severity of the lake.

Directly across the water at Villa Carlotta

lived Gian Battista Sommariva, another highly ambitious politician.

And Sommariva deeply resented Melzi for beating him to the top job

and there was no love lost between the neighbours.

This fuelled both men's gardens as they vied to out-do each other.

Melzi appointed a botanist and started filling his garden

with the latest plants from around the world.

Sommariva followed suit,

buying up more land to make room for his growing collection.

Melzi fired a salvo of Rhododendron indicum, imported from Japan.

Not to be outdone,

Sommariva responded by planting hundreds of them.

But Melzi wasn't going to take that lying down.

He did his own exotic planting right on the waterfront,

and Sommariva could see that across the water

it was like a horticultural bullet fired straight at him.

Melzi upped the stakes and planted ever more trees and shrubs

rarely seen in Italy at that time,

but daily visible to Sommariva.

For my money, it's Villa Melzi that wins

this rather frantic gardening duel.

Unlike Carlotta, it has a sweep and a line to it,

and the inclusion of the landscape is clever and generous.

But nevertheless, I can't help but notice that

Melzi sited his greatest treasures

where they would admired by the maximum number of people.

The garden here is planted with wonderful specimen trees

like the cedar of Lebanon,

and there are zelkovas and all sorts of trees from all over the world.

But none of them are the same as the trees on the wooded slopes,

none of them are natives.

And actually, if you look along the lake, you have this fine seam of

exotic planting, like a strip of gold showing off people's wealth.

Napoleon's rule lasted less than 20 years.

And finally, in 1861, for the first time in its history,

Italy was unified into a single political state.

Railways were built, businesses prospered,

and throughout this new Italy, and especially here in the north,

a new middle class started to emerge, and they began to take up

the hitherto-aristocratic pastime of gardening.

Going past miles of nurseries, mainly for trees.

And these nurseries really began in the 19th century,

particularly in the north -

there was money developing, for the middle classes.

And that meant that they could have gardens that weren't

just for food, and for the very first time,

there were gardening magazines, there were plant suppliers,

there were societies,

so that horticulture became a common activity.

Before I visit my last garden, I'm stopping off in Milan to visit

one of Italy's oldest nurseries, established 130 years ago.

In the spirit of the 16th-century botanists in Padua,

the Ingegnoli brothers collected plants from all over the world

and propagated them for their seeds,

feeding the new market for exotic flowers and fruits.

The business is now run by Francesco Fadini,

the sixth generation of Ingegnolis.

The railway was very, very important for us.

In 1861, to send our product, the seeds, the plants,

in all Italy, from Milano to Sicily.

-So by this stage, the whole of Italy was buying from you?

-Yes.

-So you could issue a catalogue?

-Yes. This is the catalogue for 1893.

Great pictures, too.

Look at all these different varieties of pear, it's amazing.

We don't have this now.

I like the squared paper, so people could write their notes.

-Make their notes, yes.

-It's such a good idea.

And presumably there was a genuine increase in interest?

The new type of plants were very important.

Francesco Ingegnoli, in 1880, he went to Japan, to China,

he returned with the caco.

-I don't know in English the translation of the "caco".

-I think it's persimmon.

So people must have been excited by these new plants coming in.

-To taste the first time, like a caco...

-Yes, yes.

-Is incredible.

We also have a letter of 1888. It's the thank letter.

"I received six caco. Thanks very much. And I hope that in the future,

"this variety of caco will be very famous in Italy, best regards, Giuseppe Verdi."

So you had famous customers.

There were these new fruits coming in, new varieties,

there's a kind of energy.

It was very important. They wanted to see flower, the colour, something different.

Now I understand, I understand.

I have headed north from Milan to Lake Maggiore,

and my final destination on this horticultural journey through Italy.

And this is perhaps the ultimate expression of the baroque love of extravagance and drama.

At the western end of Lake Maggiore lie three islands collectively called the Borromeos.

They're named after the aristocratic banking family who bought land on them in the 16th century.

The island that I'm visiting is called Isola Bella,

and for centuries it has attracted garden visitors like moths to the flame.

Indeed this is now my own third visit. I hope it won't be my last.

The Isola Bella is just not like anywhere else you've ever seen.

When I first saw it, I remember thinking

that it's like a sort of mad battleship wearing a party frock.

It's extravagant, it's hysterical,

It's like a drag ball parading as a garden.

And yet it's a really good garden and perhaps the best surviving

baroque example of a garden in the whole of Italy.

In 1632 Carlo Borromeo, the governor of Lake Maggiore,

commissioned this entire rocky island to be transformed into a pyramid of terraces.

Towering 100 feet up into the sky, he wanted it to look like a great galleon floating on the lake.

It took 40 years to complete,

and huge quantities of soil, marble and granite were shipped in.

Whilst this work proceeded, Borromeo set about trying to buy up

the houses of the fishermen who lived on the island.

But it wasn't all plain sailing, because a lot of the villagers couldn't be coerced into selling.

They just stayed put, which meant that the garden had to be made around them,

which is why it's such an odd shape.

Now, gradually over a long period of time, some did sell,

and pockets of the garden were able to be extended.

This is classic High Baroque drama.

Everything slightly hysterical, but in a very elegant, controlled way.

And I love these high hedges above the balustrade, they're bay hedges.

So enormous height, I mean what's that, 30 feet tall?

And you know something's up there but you don't know what,

so of course you're led, and then look at, oh!

These steps curve round and then that's ficus repens on the wall,

and then more bay above it, so you have this immaculate green, curving wall.

Very simple but immediately incredibly powerful.

MUSIC: "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" by Mozart

There's a tendency to think of baroque as all twiddles and over-ornamentation.

But this staircase does show that just texture and colour

and very, very strong shape and form with that little strip of stone is just as dramatic.

And the main purpose of the staircase is to compress the views

and heighten the sense of anticipation.

And there, this is the most incredible, theatrical,

completely dotty thing I've ever seen in a garden.

And it's... What is it? It's operatic.

And white peacocks, it's like a dream,

like walking through a door in a dream and suddenly seeing

this scalloped, vast stage set with figures.

It's like walking round the corner in your garden

and going onto the L'Escala or the Opera House at Covent Garden.

Fantastic!

MUSIC: "The Queen of the Night" from "The Magic Flute" by Mozart

The Massimo theatre is an operatic triumph of baroque kitsch and power play.

The statues of Roman gods, obelisks, scallops, waving putti,

all overlooked by the Borromeos' symbol, the unicorn.

Guests would have been entertained by music drifting up from choirs

and orchestras hidden in the garden below.

Whilst albino peacocks, imported from south-east Asia, strutted and posed archly.

The impulse to entertain, impress and show off

reaches its high point on the highest terrace.

Big open space. It's like walking into an empty ballroom.

And these amazing views on each side.

So that it couldn't be lighter and airier,

and yet these whopping great statues, and...

..there, the Borromeo symbol, the unicorn, bigger than anything else.

No doubt about who's the daddy here!

So if you come to the Borromeo party, you end up here, with all the guests in their finery

and people can see that you're having a party,

they can see you dressed in your finery,

you know, the Borromeos are having another do.

But they're not invited, that's the key thing.

This is a fortress of privilege.

It's the perfect platform for display.

Originally dominated by Mediterranean plants and the inevitable citrus,

Isola Bella underwent a transformation in the 19th century

when the plant-mad Count Vitaliano Borromeo imported a mass of exotic species

from China, India, the Americas, Himalayas and Australia.

This Camphor is truly enormous, it's...

ooh, it's a tree on a heroic scale.

But it started life as a rooted cutting.

The count bought it in with lots of other exotics that he'd collected and bought into the garden,

and was grown in a pot, and admired.

And it got bigger and bigger and then was planted out. And it's never stopped growing.

And at a rate that far exceeds any other tree in the garden.

And, in fact, most other trees altogether. It is now just colossal.

And it's very beautiful, and it's got this lovely billowing silhouette.

For all its brash ostentation, there are some secret corners of Isola Bella that are less flamboyant,

but to my mind, every bit as dramatic.

The public aren't allowed into here. I've been let in specially.

And it's my favourite bit, it's absolutely wonderful.

These great buildings of green,

and some of them are Camellia, and these great pillows of azaleas.

And there's Rhododendrons, so of course in spring, that will just explode out into colour.

I like it green, actually, I love this austerity of colour

and yet ambition on scale.

And I think you come in and immediately feel inspired

and everything's lifted up a notch or two.

Although there are marvellously elegant and sculptural parts of the garden,

from the south here and as you approach by boat and look up at this view,

what you see is totally brash.

Totally kitsch.

Completely without any taste at all.

And I love it for that.

Who could not love the way that Isola Bella is an unashamed carnival of a garden?

It's quintessentially baroque,

and that desire to put on an outward show is quintessentially Italian.

Certainly I've never visited any garden like it.

And it feels like the perfect place to end my tour of the great Italian gardens.

Isola Bella is a performance, and it's kitsch and it's brash and at times completely barmy,

but I think it's heroic.

But then, I think you must appreciate that gardens fall under that Italian spell of bella figura.

This need to create a good impression,

to look really good, and it doesn't really matter what's behind it.

And travelling through this beautiful country,

seeing amazing gardens all along the way, has been a joy.

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