Wander through the most alluring modern and historic gardens to captivate Florentine photographer Massimo Listri over the past decade. This is not a comprehensive survey, but a deeply personal compendium of 44 remarkable gardens drawn from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal, which express power, creativity, escapism and desire. Each one is vividly rendered in Listri’s luminous large-format photographs, its story summarized in a pithy vignette by British author and landscape architect Todd Longstaffe-Gowan. The combination of images and text masterfully evoke the often rich and diverse circumstances that have shaped these remarkable living and ever-evolving places, from their use as settings for improvised or ephemeral entertainments, to their role as verdant receptacles for the display of fanciful architecture, theatrical scenography, and horticultural exuberance. Discover the orchestrated vistas of Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte, the illusionistic romance of Iford Manor, the fantastical inventions of the Parco dei Mostri, as well as ornamental lakes designed for sea battles, triumphal arches, marble summer houses, to artificial cascades and Gothic follies. From the formal to the whimsical, these are realms where the imagination can truly run wild.
