From the late Middle Ages, when it embodied spirituality, through the end of the eighteenth century, when it offered pleasurable surroundings for banquets, poetry readings, and amorous pursuits, the garden figured prominently in everyday Roman life. In this fascinating history, David Coffin provides a wealth of information on how Italian gardeners worked with the elements of color, fragrance, sound, shade, architecture, sculpture, and wildlife to achieve a wide variety of sensual effects. In so doing he presents the stages of evolution in classic Italian gardening, which was replaced in the late eighteenth century by the more naturalistic English style. Coffin first considers the role of cloistered gardens in the Middle Ages and shows how they were later incorporated as private spaces within the larger Renaissance gardens. Describing the introduction of sculptural collections and waterworks into gardens during the sixteenth century, he explores some of the rich, often complicated, iconographical programs that emerged. The extension of garden parks in the seventeenth century marks the decline of architecture in landscaping and the advent of landscape design as a dominant factor. Throughout this book Coffin concentrates on the garden as a site for entertainment and on the development of design components that eventually permitted gardens to be freely open to the public.

Tracing the history of the Roman villa during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, David Coffin presents the first comprehensive study of the subject of villeggiatura (withdrawal to a country residence) in English. Further, his book is the first in any language to analyze the villa in terms of its social function and meaning rather than its architecture and formal properties. Coffin draws on a wide variety of printed material and previously unused sources to explore twenty of the most important residences built by dignitaries of Church and State. Early plans and drawings and photographs aid him in reconstructing the leisure activity of the leaders of Renaissance society in the settings that were built to enhance it.