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Italian Villas And Their Gardens, Edith Wharton, Maxfield Parrish

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904) followed her debut novel, The Valley of Decision (1902). Century magazine commissioned Wharton for a series of six articles on Italian architecture and an accompanying book-length collection. Wharton embarked out of Boston in January 1903, disembarked near Genoa, and proceeded to tour widely — Viterbo up to Orvieto; Siena, Florence, Rome, and Venice — following recommendations from Vernon Lee, the book’s dedicatee, who “better than anyone else, has understood and interpreted the garden-magic of Italy.” The book analyzes more than eighty wonders, intercut with fifty-two illustrations: wide-angle photographs and evocative color compositions …