Villa Medicea di Castello II – the It’s Florence! Medici villas series

Villa Medicea di Castello, the discovery, part II: second issue of our series about the Ville Medicee, the Countryside Medici’s manors.

As we were saying in the previous post, amongst the Ville Medicee is one of the most important, with a long history spanning from the Middle Ages, with a “before – Medicis” life, to today.

In the previous post we left the Villa Medicea di Castello in 1550, the year of the death of architect and sculptor Niccolò Tribolo, the designer of Castello’s garden.

Too busy for a Villa Medicea?

Tribolo’s death, along with the demanding and expensive works for Palazzo Pitti, delayed the Villa Medicea di Castello project.

The Villa was finished only under Cosimo’s son, Ferdinando I de’ Medici (1549-1609), between 1588 and 1595.

Villa Medicea di Castello after the Medicis

It’s only with the Lorena family (the Lorenas became Grand Dukes of Tuscany in 1737) that the Villa sees another time of expansion: an English Garden and tow orangeries (the Villa still has a beautiful collection of citrus).

After that, a sad decline. With the birth of the Kingdom of Italy the Ville Medicee became part of the King’s property. The Savoy preferred to Villa di Castello Villa la Petraia as their countryside palace in the Florence area.

In 1919 King Vittorio Emanuele III donated Villa Medicea di Castello to the State. In the Seventies the Villa has been completely restored and became the headquarters of a very important Italian institution: the Accademia della Crusca.

Accademia della Crusca at Villa Medicea di Castello: the Italian language thesaurus

The Accademia della Crusca is “the most important research institution on the Italian language”. If you love Italy, if you agree with Thomas Mann about Italian being