"The castle stood revealed on a distant spur that overlooked the confluence of two rivers.

In between wooded hills sloped in on either side like a scenery in a toy theatre.
This landscape of steep hills covered in chestnut trees with mountains in the background was typical of the Lunigiana, the north western frontier of Tuscany......
.Those who saw the Fortezza della Brunella for the first time had mixed feelings.
For my father ,who had fallen in love with it at first sight in 1896 this extraordinary choice for a dwelling place promised an enchanted world far from English formality". That' s the beginning of the Garden in the Sky first chapter of"A Tuscan Childhood" by Kinta Beevor.
Daughter of Aubrey and Lina Waterfield, respectively painter and journalist and later one of the founders of the British Institude of Florence, Kinta was five in 1916, when she settled with her parents in Aulla.
The freedom and the enchanted world of the life at the castle developed and increased under the backdrop of the mountain landscape of Lunigiana. Writers, poets and painters such as D.H. Lawrence, R.Trevelyan and Rex Whistler, all fell in love with the magical garden on the casle roof and its views across to the Carrara mountains .
With the outbreak of the First World War the castle became occupied by soldiers and Kinta moved to her aunt Janet Ross' house at Poggio Gherardo where Boccaccio set part of his Decameron. "This ancient castellated villa, -she cited in her autobiography- surrounded by its three small farms with their vineyards and olive groves overlooked Florence from the hill of Fiesole.

"It was on a stormy October afternoon in 1923, forty-seven years ago, that we first saw the Val d'Orcia and the house that was to be our home. We were soon to be married and had spent many weeks looking at estates for sale, in various parts of Tuscany, we knew what we were looking for: a place with enough work to fill our lifetime, but we also hoped that it might be in a setting of some beauty. Privately I thought that we might perhaps find one of the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century villas which were then almost as much a part of the Tuscan landscape as the hills on which they stood or the long cypress avenues which led up to them: villas with an austere façade broken only by a deep loggia, high vaulted rooms of perfect proportions, great stone fireplaces, perhaps a little courtyard with a well, and a garden with a fountain.
This is an extract from "Shadows and Images" by Iris Origo, daughter of Sybil Cutting, the owner of Villa Medici at Fiesole. With her husband Antonio Origo, an Italian landowner, Iris bought Villa La Foce and its farm located in the clay hills, overlooking the Val D'Orcia near Siena, dedicating her life to bringing prosperity and cultural and social changes to this formerly poverty-stricken area. The gardens and the estate of La Foce constitute one of the most important and best kept early twentieth-century gardens in Italy. Amid 3,500 acres of farmland in the countryside near Pienza, with sweeping views of the Tuscan landscape, La Foce was the childhood dream garden of Iris Origo. Passionate about the order and symmetry of Florentine gardens, she and her husband employed the talented English architect and family friend Cecil Pinsent, who had designed the gardens at Villa Medici, to reawaken the natural magic of the property. Pinsent designed the structure of simple, elegant, box-edged beds and green enclosures that give shape to the Origos' shrubs, perennials and vines, and created a garden of soaring cypress walks, native cyclamen, lawns and wildflower meadows.

Today the estate is run by the Origo daughters, Benedetta and Donata, and is open to the public one day a week. Iris's daughters, continuing the myth, welcome the traveller into the Reinassance.
The garden with its rigorously essential harmony of shapes and colours provides in July the scenario of an annual festival of chamber music. Here the evocative strength of nature and music will rapture the sensitive traveller in a sort of metaphisical experience.