Villa La Pietra was bought and somewhat modified in the 1460s by the Florentine banker Francesco Sassetti.

The villa was given its present form in the seventeenth century by the cardinal Luigi Capponi, possibly with the assistance of Carlo Fontana.

[1]: 22 The villa contains the art collection assembled by the Actons, which reflects twentieth-century Anglo-American taste.

[4] The collection includes works from the circle of Giotto, Romanesque sculptures, a relief of the Virgin and Child by Donatello, and fifteenth-century tapestries made for the de' Medici family.

[7]: 109  The Actons laid out a formal Baroque Italian garden with extensive stonework, including almost two hundred statues, many of them by the Venetian sculptors Orazio Marinali and Antonio Bonazza, brought to Florence from the villas of the Brenta.