Villa Le Balze

Via Vecchia Fiesolana 26
tel. +39 05559208

Open to the public by reservation only.
The garden may be viewed as part of a visit to the gardens of Fiesole, by reservation only.

×History
Villa Le Balze

This villa was built by Cecil Pinsent (1884–1963) and Geoffrey Scott for Charles A. Strong, a wealthy American philosophy enthusiast, between 1911 and 1913.

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The building stands on a long, narrow and very steep plot of land known as Le Balze di Macciò. Pinsent began to develop the garden with Scott in 1914 but carried on single-handed from 1917.

Considering the awkward shape of the plot, Pinsent made the best possible use of the space available, creating deep perspectives organised as a succession of "rooms". From the Via Vecchia Fiesolana, the visitor enters a first garden with eight lawn beds, moving on to a secret garden shut off by a high wall to the south which blocks out the view of Florence.
The villa itself is set between a "formal garden" to the east and a "wild garden" to the west. This pattern allows the visitor to transition from an area with an architecturally structured garden to a naturally hilly landscape of meadows and olive groves.
Le Balze is particularly rich in such embellishments as mosaics, carved tufa, stalactites and stucco work, all by Pinsent himself.

Le Balze was donated to Georgetown University in 1979.