Italian gardens

Jessica Sheffield, a graduate student at Penn State who is teaching with us in Rome this summer, is discovering flowers and gardens in Italy and building a nice account of them on her blog.

Our students interested in Roman gardens will want to explore the Borghese Gardens, the Villa Doria Pamphilj gardens in Trastevere, the Botanical Gardens, also in Trastevere, and the Villa D’Este in Tivoli. Especially recommended as a historical account of the Italian garden is Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), a beautifully illustrated book by a prominent art historian.

Donatelloamongtheblackshirts.jpg

Professor Lazzaro is also co-editor, with Roger Crum, of another book that might interest students of the rhetoric of Rome — Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

Students of rhetoric may also be familiar with Lawrence W. Rosenfield, “Central Park and the Celebration of Civic Virtue,” in Thomas W. Benson, ed., American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), which reflects on the Italian garden as a social and civic space.