Villa Reale di Marlia: A Historic Court Estate and Landscape Garden in Italy
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.8
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Republic of Lucca
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page20 sections
History
Villa Reale di Marlia is a monumental historic estate in Italy, at Marlia in the municipality of Capannori, near Lucca. Its principal villa was built in the fifteenth century, while the wider complex preserves Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, English landscape, and Art Deco phases. The estate became especially associated with Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister and ruler of Lucca and Piombino, whose court used it as a residence and setting for performances.
Early Fortification and the Buonvisi Estate
The earliest predecessor of the estate was a fortification occupied by the Duke of Tuscia, the historical region corresponding broadly to Tuscany, during the Lombard period, probably in the ninth century. The property later passed to the Avvocati family and then to the Buonvisi family, who held it from 1517 to 1651. After the Buonvisi commercial enterprise failed in 1629, the family sold much of its property.
The Luccan nobles Olivieri and Lelio Orsetti subsequently acquired the villa. They rebuilt the palace, established a Baroque garden, and constructed the Palazzina dell’Orologio. The garden’s arrangement was also captured in an engraving by Venturi, preserving an image of the estate during the Orsetti period.
Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi and the Neoclassical Transformation
In 1806 Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi acquired the villa and park from the Orsetti family after prolonged negotiations. The purchase price was 500,000 francs in silver coin and may have reached 700,000 francs. At the same time, she acquired the adjacent Villa del Vescovo from the archiepiscopal administration and began joining the two properties. The name “Reale” was adopted in connection with Elisa’s presence and her status as ruler of Lucca and Piombino.
Between 1811 and 1814, Elisa reorganized the park in the English landscape style, a design approach based on irregular planting, open lawns, curving compositions, and carefully planned views rather than strict geometric symmetry. Much of the Baroque garden ornament was demolished, especially around Villa del Vescovo. Numerous plant species were obtained from the Royal Park of Naples through a botanist sent for that purpose, while fallow deer, goats, and Merino sheep were introduced into the groves. The scheme remained incomplete, although the lawn in front of the villa was greatly enlarged.
Elisa also transformed the late-Renaissance palace into a Neoclassical residence by raising it one storey and altering its exterior and interior. Giovanni Lazzarini and Pierre-Théodore Bienaimé coordinated the architectural work, while Théodore Bienaimé directed the interior modifications with French and Italian painters and stucco workers. A small but lavish court developed around the residence.
Courtly Life and the Post-Napoleonic Estate
The villa became a setting for courtly performances and entertainments. Niccolò Paganini performed there several times at Elisa’s invitation and was appointed by her as musical director. Metternich praised the amenity and refinement of the English garden, and Racine’s Phèdre was among the theatrical works first performed at the estate. Villa Reale di Marlia was also associated with Elisa’s relationship with her Grand Equerry, Bartolomeo Cenami. A Grand Equerry was a senior court official responsible for the sovereign’s horses and equestrian household.
After Napoleon’s fall, Elisa fled before British forces commanded by Lord William Bentinck. She was later imprisoned in Vienna and died in Trieste in 1820. The Bourbon-Parma rulers of Lucca then acquired the villa, interrupting the planned reorganization of the park. Under Maria Luisa, Lorenzo Nottolini was commissioned to add a Kaffeehaus, a garden pavilion intended for refreshments and social use, and an astronomical observatory. The observatory remained unfinished.
After Lucca was incorporated into Tuscany, the villa became a summer residence of the Habsburg-Lorraine grand-ducal court from 1847. It later entered the property of the Italian Crown and was assigned to the Bourbon family of Capua. When the estate was offered for sale after 1919, the municipality of Capannori intervened to protect the public interest.
The Pecci-Blunt Period and Later Restoration
The Pecci-Blunt family acquired Villa Reale di Marlia in 1923 and maintained and restored the estate. Family memorabilia associated with their uncle Gioacchino Pecci, who became Pope Leo XIII, were transferred to the Palazzina dell’Orologio. Count Cecil Pecci-Blunt also bought furniture, paintings, portraits, and sculptures on the antiques market, furnishing the villa as a local museum of the First Empire. The collection included the bed of Talleyrand.
During the Second World War, the villa sheltered the last Romanov claimant to the Russian throne. In 2015, the heirs of the Pecci-Blunt family sold the estate to the Swiss patrons Henric and Marina Grönberg, who commissioned extensive restoration work.
Remains
Villa Reale di Marlia comprises the late-Renaissance principal villa, an extensive historic park, the adjacent Villa del Vescovo, the Palazzina dell’Orologio, entrance buildings, garden theatres, water features, the Grotta di Pan, the Spanish Garden, and other garden structures and follies. Together, these elements preserve successive phases of formal and naturalistic garden design around the principal residence.
Principal Buildings and Entrance Complex
Villa Reale
The principal villa combines a fifteenth-century building with later architectural alterations. Elisa’s rebuilding replaced the rusticated treatment of the facade with Neoclassical mouldings, raised the structure by one floor, and added a rear portico with a terrace. French and Italian artists and stucco workers redecorated the interiors. In the large ballroom on the ground floor, Stefano Tofanelli painted the fresco Dance of the Hours.
Palazzina dell’Orologio
The Palazzina dell’Orologio was built during the Orsetti period for service functions, including stables, kitchens, and other ancillary uses. Its principal facade has a portico, a loggia above it, and a raised central section containing the clock that gives the building its name. The building now contains the Pecci family museum, with walls lined with books, private correspondence files, porcelain bearing the family coat of arms, and personal clothing associated with Gioacchino Pecci, including a red eighteenth-century-style cardinal’s robe. A dome-shaped secretaire has concealed compartments operated by moving its frames.
Entrance Complex
Elisa’s entrance complex consists of an imposing entrance, a semicircular courtyard, and two Palladian-style guard buildings. One of the guard buildings serves as the custodian’s residence. Large white Neoclassical marble vases decorate the courtyard, while the actual entrance to the park is placed asymmetrically on its right side.
Formal Gardens and Theatrical Spaces
Orsetti Baroque Garden
The Orsetti garden was arranged according to the formal principles of the Baroque period. Fountains, nymphaea, basins, statues, and other water effects were organized within rigorous geometric layouts. An elegant enclosing gate once stood across the lawn in front of the villa; that gate was later destroyed.
Upper Park and Theatre of Water
The upper, seventeenth-century areas of the park include the Green Theatre, the Lemon Garden, and the Theatre of Water behind the villa. The Theatre of Water centers on a large semicircular basin decorated with rocks, jets, cascades, statues of Jupiter, Saturn, Adonis, and Pomona, water-spouting mascarons, flower vases, and a tall clipped hedge.
Green Theatre
Created in 1652, the Green Theatre is 24 metres deep. Yew hedges form a semicircular auditorium with stone seats, while additional seating occupies niche-like boxes cut into the enclosing hedge. A green curtain and a sequence of spherical topiary forms divide the audience from the stage and imitate theatre lights.
The stage has slightly inclined wings approximately 5.50 metres high. Eighteenth-century terracotta statues representing characters from the Italian commedia dell’arte, a comic theatre tradition built around recurring masked figures, stand between the wings. The figures include Pulcinella, Colombina, and Pantalone. Two topiary forms between the stage and orchestra represent the conductor’s podium and the prompter’s pit.
Lemon Garden
The Lemon Garden forms part of an axis parallel to the villa’s main axis. It contains four rectangular beds and a slightly raised area with a large fishpond measuring approximately 20 by 10 metres. The pond is bordered by a balustrade that ends in an exedra, a curved architectural recess, made of tufa and smooth stone. A niche in the exedra contains the group of Leda and the Swan. On the opposite side, sixteenth-century sculptures of the giants representing the Arno and Serchio rivers pour water from urns.
English Landscape Park and Water Features
Principal Lawn and Lower Park
A long, unobstructed vista extends in front of the villa. The lower park incorporated the former garden of Villa del Vescovo and additional land, extending and nearly doubling the principal lawn. Its landscape contains irregular groups of trees, gently sloping lawns, woodland, streams, shaded paths, and a lake created in the area of the former walled gardens.
The plantings include beeches, pines, holm oaks, oaks, limes, plane trees, ginkgoes, maples, and horse chestnuts. Another pond lies on the villa’s visual axis and is accompanied by water effects and a rear terrace decorated with three statues. After the Pecci-Blunt acquisition, the park’s original English landscape vegetation was faithfully replanted.
Grotta di Pan
The seventeenth-century features that remain include a small church and the Grotta di Pan, a nymphaeum, meaning a garden pavilion or grotto associated with water and artificial rockwork. The grotto has an open square-plan section and a closed circular section decorated with pebbles arranged to imitate a natural cave.
Spanish Garden
Two stair ramps connect the Grotta di Pan with the Spanish Garden, a rectangular Art Deco garden designed by J. Greber around 1920. Inspired by the Alhambra and by Islamic garden principles, it contains a large basin, branching channels, and grass beds.
Garden near Villa del Vescovo
Near Villa del Vescovo is a small two-level garden. Its lower level contains rectangular beds edged with clipped box and is enclosed on two sides by the retaining wall of the villa’s upper terrace. Niches in that terrace wall contain statues.
