Charles Latham's Gardens of Italy

In the spring of 1903, Country Life's first staff photographer, Charles Latham, set off from London's Victoria station with his large-format camera and several boxes of fragile glass negatives bound for Rome. He spent the months that followed photographing some of Italy's finest historic gardens. In all, Latham photographed thirty-seven gardens, and his powerfully evocative pictures were published by Country Life in 1905 in two volumes under the title of The Gardens of Italy, with a text by the well known contemporary garden writer, Evelyn March Phillipps.

Latham's photographs were immediately acclaimed and the images are characteristic of his work in their exceptional clarity. As a result of the political turmoil that overtook Italy in the nineteenth century, many of the gardens had already fallen into a state of picturesque decrepitude; others, around Florence, had been taken over by English and American expatriates and were in the process of restoration. But even though some of the aristocratic owners and their gardeners might have gone, the elaborate architecture, statuary and ingenious waterworks which Renaissance designers so admired remained largely intact and were brilliantly captured in all their faded magnificence by Latham's camera.

Today, many of these gardens have vanished, destroyed by social upheaval and war, though a few were painstakingly restored in the post-war years. Charles Latham's outstanding compositions bear testament to the rich heritage of some of Italy's great gardens in the golden age just before the First World War. The 200 superbly reproduced photographs are accompanied by Helena Attlee's incisive commentary on twenty-one of these magnificent Renaissance and Baroque gardens.