Category Archives: Renzo Mongiardino

Winter Gardens

L’esprit du jardin d’hiver is in the air, a quest for a life-affirming sanctuary in colder climes. Russian royalty dedicated palaces to Winter, as with the sixteen-hundred room Winter Palace of the Romanov’s in St. Petersberg. Emperor Nikolai I decreed that Russian artist Eduard Gau create watercolor renderings of the Winter Palace’s interior, the Russian Empire’s […]

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Villa Tre Ville – Then and Now

The opening introduction on Villa Tre Ville’s website – the Amalfitani home of Franco Zeffirelli until 2009 – reads: At Villa Tre Ville, there has always been an atmosphere of art and culture. The property was bought around the 1920s by Mikhail Semenov, the Russian writer, who was the first to gather around him that […]

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Home Away From Rome

  Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino Garavani’s busuiness and life partner, purchased La Vagnola, an 18th-century Tuscan villa in Cetona, in 1986 and enlisted the maestro of atmosphere Renzo Mongiardino to create enchanted interiors inspired by the surrounding lush, classical gardens. For twenty-five years he and Valentino vacationed here to escape the pressures of Rome and their […]

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The Tower of Peretti

Elsa Peretti’s holiday retreat on the Tuscan coast was hardly your typical relaxed and breezy waterfront dwelling. La Torre was a ruin of  a watchtower on the steep and craggy cliffs of Southern Tuscany built by Spanish invaders in the 16th-century as a military lookout between the Tuscan archipelago and the island of Corsica. Its […]

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Under The Tuscan Sun

From the Etruscans’ who left behind many roads that are still traveled today, to the expansive power of the Roman Empire and the Medici family, who financed  much of the Renaissance, Tuscany is rich in history, romantic ancient villages, rustic farmhouses and elegant villas, distinctive regional cuisine, and soft rolling hills for as far and […]

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