Italian gardens vary widely according to their historical date and geographic location. This collection approaches Italian gardens of all periods, from the middle ages to modern times, and it ranges widely throughout the peninsula, from Genoa to Sicily, the Veneto to Liguria, and Ferrara to Florence.

The authors are a distinguished group of Italian, American, English and German scholars, with different backgrounds in art history, literature, architecture, planning, and cultural history.

The explorations of the subject from these different perspectives illuminate not only their own disciplines, but are concerned to make many fresh connections between garden art and the politics of nationalism, between the art of gardens and urban infrastructure, between cultural movements like freemasonry and site planning, between design and planting materials.

The book offers therefore a narrative of the garden by selecting ten high points of its history, which are introduced with a consideration by the volume editor of the fresh challenges to contemporary Italian garden history.