The Gardens at Villa Massei can be visited by organized groups of minimum 20 persons by appointment from April through October. For a complete discussion of the garden and its history order the book, A Garden in Lucca by Paul Gervais, by going to the Amazon.com link provided at this site.
Inquiries should be made at this website.

   I live in someone else's fulfilled dream.
The things you want the most in life you rarely get; when you don't want something, when it's never even occurred to you to want it, then it falls right in your lap. That's the way it is with houses. Sometimes.

   I grew up longing for a white clapboard New England colonial with shifting plank floors, wainscotting, and a row of crown glass windowpanes over the door. If I never wanted a sixteenth-century, rose-colored Italian hunting lodge in the hills of Lucca, it's only because I'd never known they existed--we don't have such things in North Tewksbury, Massachusetts where I grew up. I'd never imagined that I would one day make my home in the lush countryside of Tuscany, and that this home of mine would include sixty acres of land, half of it pinewood, half farmed, and that this home would be three houses, in fact, nestled together in a cluster like a little village onto itself.

   But the most unlikely thing I've ever come to possess in my life of longing for that which never came my way is the garden I keep. I have a garden? Now I never ever wanted that! It was 1981 when my companion, Gil Cohen, and I first laid eyes on Villa Massei (mah-SAY-ee), Count Sinebaldi's Renaissance country house, ten minutes away from the ancient walled city of Lucca. The property was then in British hands, but its recently widowed owner had decided to sell. What new and sudden fantasies the whole prospect of buying such a place evoked! I saw myself living off the fruits of the land: the berries, the apples, the peaches, the cherries, the persimmons, the figs, the grapes--I could go on. I saw myself wandering the grandiose halls and rooms of this house like Byron in his Pisan palace, my head full of metaphor, my library growing, my manuscripts turning inevitably into published books, my tomatoes into conserve.

   Gil and I bought the place in the cool, reckless blink of an eye, few questions asked. Soon, it was too late for mature second thoughts and a sensible change of mind. The journey had begun, and the train had no scheduled stops until our life here was in place. Enter the present. Here's my library, here are my books, here are the tomato preserves, red and luscious and vacuum-packed in clear glass jars.
It has always seemed to me that this house and its garden are one. Lucca has hundreds of villas, far more princely than mine might seem to the untraveled eye; this city is famous for them, in fact. But I know of very few such houses that have the kind of relationship to their sites that mine does; rather than sitting pompously on a pedestal in cold remove from its grounds, my house is in the garden, of the garden.

   I think of my entry hall as a kind of garden portal, in fact, something you pass through quickly en route from gardens freshly remembered to gardens not yet seen. It's an all white room with stone fruit-filled vases on plinths; it stands on its neutrality, a quiet passage. I often say to guests at the front door, "Come in ... and then out!" Moments later they're in the loggia: a garden with a roof, really, five high arches, four "Tuscan order" columns of pietra serena, the local gray stone used to embellish the more important buildings here. There are plants in terracotta pots positioned about the wicker furniture which sets this stage for open air summer life: living, eating, entertaining, cats in the black bamboo, and swallows in the eaves.

   When we first took up residence here, this loggia, the only notable architectural feature of an otherwise plain, even somewhat austere house, was walled in. In the early part of the last century (the 20th) the then padrone, a gynecologist, annexed the space for his clinic. But Gil and I had no need of this additional interior square-footage; the house already had seventeen rooms without it. The outlines of the arches and a bit of the supporting columns were clearly visible on the facade and so we knew what we were getting into when we knocked out the walls, restoring the loggia to its antique, rustic grandeur. It's the most important bit of restoration we've done here, well worth all the dust and pneumatic headaches.

   At its threshold is a shaded garden under a mantel of wisteria worrying it way up a leaning wrought iron pergola. Beyond, stands the grotto: a temple of pagan memories, a garden folly of frightening, ironic beauty. Its five stone masks, spewing spring water, are enshrined in niches of lava rock. Its pink facade, rigid with solid geometry (columns in relief and Ionic capitals), shimmers in its temporal perfection--I never could have had this dream in New England.
   Off to the right there's a century-old camphor tree, rare in these parts. On the other side is my orange garden: a cruciform-based parterre of dwarf box is the setting for eight mop heads of Citrus mitis, the Panama orange, standing tall in festooned, hand made terracotta pots. There's a flood of white "Sea Foam" roses cascading off a low ledge, and there are pink and yellow honeysuckles, mauve "Marie Viaud" roses, and a sky-blue California lilac trained up on a southern, framing wall.

   But the garden, like an "enfilade" of rooms, beckons with its narrow, framed views of distant, further gardens, a few new themes, some variations on those already heard. The rose garden is the next transition space, but this one invites you to tarry. The delicate pink "New Dawn" climbs a fifteen-foot high stone retaining wall built by one of the Counts Sinebaldi in the eighteenth century. At it feet are the antique roses "Cuisse de Nymphe Emue," with its expensive perfume, the deep mauve "Cardinal Richelieu," face-powder pink "Souvenir de Malmaison," and the purple-petaled "Charles de Milles." There are a few modern, David Austin roses as well: the deep yellow "Graham Thomas" and the bold pink "Gertrude Jeckyl."
   In a broad, fully enclosed green room beyond, "The Italian Garden" broods like the image of a poet frozen in stone. I built it myself just six years ago, but it's beginning to look as if it's always been there. Sixteen planting beds are walled in knee-high with clipped box hedges, a pair of terracotta oil jars, their rounded shoulders shrugging in the midst of all those angles, creating focal points. In September, the eight central hexagonal beds become eight leavened cushion of Caryopteris x clandonesis "Heavenly Blue," their dusty blooms born at terminal panicles over a blur of toothy gray leaves.

   A few steps and you're out of there through an arch of sweet bay. The semi-formal orchard, a viale of thirty-six "Rennes du Marché" cherries, suggests a pastoral stroll through your earliest pastoral memories. In spring, fugacious white blooms that seem almost born on the wind form a gothic arch, a gallery promenade whose destination is an urn on a plinth in a bed of blue Germanica irises. In late winter, the young, bare-limbed cherries wade in deep floods of yellow and white narcissuses, and in March, the stone retaining wall on the uphill side is lined with a thousand white bearded irises.
A brief descent along an old stone road brings you to a huge rectangular meadow, a single, simple path mown precisely down its center. Wild flowers are the show here in spring, offering a reprise in September, but the views to the Apauan Alps in the distance sometimes succeed in stealing it.

   So now that you've made the loop, you've seen almost everything. Almost. You've missed the Mediterranean garden at the swimming pool, the woodland garden beyond, and the new garden at the guest house, a terrace of rosemary in diamond shaped beds, a pair of bitter orange trees, a bench in a sunny border and its collection of sun-loving plants.
You're at the edge of the front garden now instead, a broad sweep of lawn lined with box hedges behind which loom, beneath cypresses, a wild plum, and a Judas tree, silver leaved phlomises and salvias and verbascums. The plantsman finds much diversion here in a three-hundred year old Zizyphus tree, all wretched and thorny, like something a not-terribly-wicked witch would grow.

   If my secret garden is Italian in concept, then this front garden is English, as the Italians have never collected plants in clean bordering beds as I do here.

   But a French friend recently said that "it all looks very Connecticut"; I didn't quite know how to take that, though I'm sure there are lots of lovely gardens in New England. This ponderous remark of his reminded me of the fact that we bring our own cultures with us when we move great distances. An Italian friend once said that my salone, the nineteenth century style room I'd always thought of as quite Lucchese in style, looks "classically American." Was he thinking of the White House? Or was he thinking of those chalky white colonial rooms in Portsmouth, New Hampshire or Ipswich, Massachusetts, rooms full of Chippendale and Queen Anne highboys, the rooms I'd once so admired as a child dreaming about the house I'd one day have when I grew up.
In the eyes of certain observers, apparently, I have that house after all.