Villa La Pietra – Home of Bankers -Various!

This villa , with it’s extensive gardens, is one that we regularly go to on our garden tours in Tuscany. It is not only beautiful – but also quirky with so many diverse statues dotted around  – and frankly as it is such a large garden with so many “rooms” to visit -it also works out as good value for money!

This week , for the first time, we were able to arrange a tour that included a visit inside the house and were told by our excellent guide  Donata,  a little bit more about how the Villa itself had been developed and enhanced by its various owners.

To the British expatriates based in Florence probably the best known previous owners of the Villa were the Actons – particularly Harold, who was partially – but memorably – immortalised as eccentric aesthete  Anthony Blanche” in Evelyn Waugh‘s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945).

Harold Acton denied this – although it is well known that, like Anthony Blanche, he declaimed passages from The Waste Land through a megaphone from the balcony of his rooms in Meadow Buildings at Christ Church college in Oxford.

Evelyn Waugh himself revealed in a letter to Lord Baldwin, “There is an aesthetic bugger who sometimes turns up in my novels under various names — that was 2/3 Brian Howard and 1/3 Harold Acton. People think it was all Harold, who is a much sweeter and saner man than Howard.”

What is certain and confirmed by Donata was that invitation lists to parties at La Pietra read like a Who’s Who of the famous and important people in post-world war II British society – including his school friends from Eton Eric Blair (aka George Orwell),  Cyril Connolly,  Robert Byron,  Alec Douglas-Home, Ian Fleming, Brian Howard,  Oliver Messel,  Anthony Powell and Henry Yorke (the novelist Henry Green). Signed photos on the table include the Queen and Prince Phillip, and a beautiful portrait photo of Princess Margaret. Winston Churchill was also a visitor.

So where do the Bankers come in?

Harold’s mother Hortense Acton, a talented socialite and tireless hostess,  was the daughter of William Mitchell, President of First National Trust Bank in Alton, Illinois. and it was her family money that purchased the Villa La Pietra.

They were happy with the Villa that had first been built in the country a mile outside Florence in the fifteenth century by the Macinghi family who married into another banking family – the Strozzi.

In 1460 it was bought by the Florentine banker Francesco Sassetti, manager of the Medici Bank and member of the famous Florentine Sassetti family frescoed by Ghirlandaio on the walls of the Sassetti Chapel in Chiesa Santa Trinita on Via Tornabuoni.  Francesco Sassetti stands between his young son and none other than Lorenzo the Magnificent in the segment of the painting shown above.

In 1491 Francesco Sassetti‘s heirs sold the villa to Piedro di Niccolo Capponi of the Capponi family. Cardinal Luigi Capponi made substantial renovations to the villa in the seventeenth century, adding the baroque exterior, thought to be designed by Carlo Fontana.

In 1908 the villa was bought by Arthur Acton and his wife Hortense, who held parties and spent money until WW2 when they left for neutral Switzerland and the Villa La Pietra was appropriated by the Germans. Donata explained that the never fearful Hortense had made a call directly to Mussolini to warn him not to let his troops mess with her house – and it is a measure of her character and charm that they didn’t – every detail and every connection made across their rooms was maintained intact to the extent that the Acton’s collection now has State protection – items cant even be moved across the room!

It is not possible to take photos of the interior of this Villa so this image above of this beautiful old wooden lion and the Bernando Daddi Madonna – once stolen but now restored – has been taken from stock photos.

Great visit – Thank you Banking families for your spirit of preservation!