History

Giovanni di Cosimo de’ Medici, the younger of Cosimo the Elder’s two sons, commissioned Michelozzo — the family’s preferred architect and designer of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi — in 1452. The brief was explicit: a country house on the hillside above Fiesole that could function as a philosophical retreat from Florence. Michelozzo’s solution was to cut three horizontal terraces into the slope, creating a lower service level, a middle garden level, and an upper level housing the residential block with its south-west-facing loggia. The garden terraces were planted with fruit trees, a bosco and a formal lower parterre — the first example of a Renaissance garden designed to incorporate the landscape panorama as its principal ornamental element.

After Giovanni’s death in 1463, the villa passed briefly to his brother Lorenzo the Magnificent. The humanist poet Angelo Poliziano, tutor to Lorenzo’s children and key figure in the Florentine Platonic Academy, stayed at the villa in 1478–79, completing his Stanze per la giostra in the garden loggia. The villa changed hands several times during the Medici exile and subsequent Florentine political upheavals. In the 20th century, it was owned by a succession of cultivated foreigners attracted by the hilltop panorama; the current owners maintain it as a private residence while opening the garden periodically.