Urban Nature

Italy: Florence and Venice

The Garden is a testing ground for Nature lovers. Vines, trees, and flowers grow—cultivated—often to complement a home and provide a respite from the demands of human civilization. 

But if gardens bring Nature in, Venice is a city founded on the concept of going out to Nature—out on the water, out on the lagoon, out on the Sea. These two types of spaces are perfect, if unexpected, pairs. Each presumes the ability of man to survive and thrive in an environment. Trees and plants may come into a backyard, for example, because man's rationality shall be sure to keep the garden from becoming a wilderness. And living amongst islands did not stop Venice from becoming a thriving city with a high population density. Today's residents and (the early founders) made a decision: no cars, no carriages, but boats. Humans thrived from these other inventions, yet the Venetians did not believe that humans can only inhabit places navigable by coach—just as 19th century innovators did not feel confined by the ground or 20th by our atmosphere.

From Villa Gamberaia, just outside of Florence, the proximity of homes to the Tuscan landscape is abundantly clear, with brush surrounding these hilltop homes.

Like most gardens, the gardens of Villa Gamberaia are centered around specific experiences — tasting an orange, walking along water, or spotting a single flower through the bushes.

Gardens are structures spaces, with prominent walkways or axes guiding the movement of visitors — usually human. Yet they are never truly tamed, as here a lizard makes a resting spot on a piece of art.

The building blocks of a garden are organic from the obvious — the flowers and trees which are staples of the modern garden — to the subtle — like these seashells which adorn grottos

Flowers go hand-in-hand with architectural features in gardens, growing over, above, and between them over a garden's lifetime.

The waters of Venice reflect the buildings above.

The sunset skies over the Piazza San Marco show seabirds flying overhead.

Gondoliers navigate between buildings. Almost no people live on the first floor of buildings because of the variations of the tides, as seen along the walls where algae grows.

These canals have become the defining features of Venice. The Gondola and the gondolier join the symbol of the lion to define a Venetian identity, powerfully shown on their flag alongside the flag of the country they now belong to, Italy.