Villa Gamberaia, built in the Tuscan style by the Florentine gentleman-merchant Zanobi Lapi in the early 1600s, is located on the hillside of Settignano, overlooking the city of Florence, Italy and the surrounding Arno Valley.

1 View from the upper terrace][1] The villa is celebrated for the unique design of its gardens, originally laid out by Zanobi Lapi and his nephews in the first half of the seventeenth century and preserved until now with few major changes.

[3] The design has inspired landscape and garden architects throughout the world, including Charles Platt, A. E. Hanson, and Ellen Shipman in the United States and Cecil Pinsent and Pietro Porcinai in Italy and the UK.

[5] The Beginnings The first mention of the property dates to the late fourteenth century and refers to the grant to Giovanni Benozzo in 1398 of a farm and house in the place called Gamberaia by the Abbess of San Martino a Mensola.

Evidence of Lapi ownership and patronage is visible in an inscription on the architrave of a door inside the east entrance to the villa ("Zenobius Lapius erexit ac fundavit A.D. MDCX") and in the heraldic lions carved on vases above the gate to the gabinetto rustico and in the relief sculptures of the nymphaeum (or 'Neptune grotto').

Documents of Zanobi's time mention a limonaia, a lawn area, and ilex woods, which remain essential parts of the garden plan, and the conduits that convey water from the springs above the nymphaeum to the several fountains, a complex hydraulic system that still functions today.

Recent studies, however, point to the Florentine architectural tradition of Bartolomeo Ammannati, Bernardo Buontalenti, and Giovanni Battista Caccini and the influence in the gardens and grottos of the theatrical designer Giulio Parigi.

The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century Following the sale of the villa in 1854 by the last Capponi owner to Pietro Favreau of Guadaloupe,[9] the property passed to members of the D’Outreleau family and, in turn, to the Fazzini, but from the 1890s it appears to have become increasingly neglected.

Neighbors and visitors also included Leo and Nina Stein, Neith Boyce and her husband Hutchins Hapgood, the artist Edward Bruce, the stage and costume designer Léon Bakst, the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, the collectors of Cézanne Egisto Fabbri and Charles Loeser, and Arthur Acton.

In 1925 Florence Blood died after a long illness contracted during her hospital service in France during the war and Princess Ghyka, who had lost most of her lands and their revenues during the Russian Revolution, sold the villa and retired to a smaller house nearby.

It was said that she did not approve of the changes that the new owner, the American-born Maud Cass Ledyard, widow of the German diplomat Baron von Ketteler, made in the parterre, where the flowering borders of the pools were replaced with trimmed box and sculpted yews and cypress, creating a more formal, evergreen and architectonic effect in the Neo-Renaissance style.