Princess Jeanne Ghyka – The Visionary Behind Villa Gamberaia’s Iconic Gardens

When Princess Jeanne Catherine Ghyka — born Kesco — first encountered Villa Gamberaia, the estate was in a state of slow decline. It was Carlo Placci, a Florentine aesthete and literary figure deeply immersed in the city's intellectual circles, who first told her that the villa was languishing in disrepair. Jeanne, struck by its poetic solitude and perched magnificently above the Arno valley, fell in love instantly. It was 1896, and though her marriage to Moldavian Prince Eugène Ghyka was nearing its end, her desire to restore and inhabit the villa became unstoppable.

Born in 1864 in Nice to Pulcherie Sturdza and General Pietro Kesco — a landowner in Bessarabia and an officer in the Russian imperial army — Jeanne lost her parents early and was raised by her uncles between Bucharest and Odessa. Like many young women of her class, she completed her education in Paris, where she studied painting, sculpture, music, and languages. The French capital, with its salons, its avant-garde currents, and its liberal freedoms, marked her deeply. A sculptor by training and a woman of intense introspection, Jeanne was drawn to a life of art and contemplation — only marginally engaging with the fashionable circles she frequented.

Ghyka’s marriage, like many aristocratic unions of the time, had been a familial arrangement. But she was, in her own quiet way, a rebel. Determined to secure Villa Gamberaia for herself, she faced the complex legal and social obstacles of the late 19th century, when a woman could not easily purchase property — let alone one of such magnitude. Yet, through persistence and with Placci’s mediation, she succeeded in acquiring the estate, an audacious and symbolic act of independence.

By then, Jeanne had become inseparable from the American painter Florence Blood, whom she had met in Paris. Their bond — deeply affectionate and creatively symbiotic — gave rise to speculation, but their companionship was rooted in a shared vision. Florence, more outgoing and practical, balanced Jeanne’s introspective, poetic nature. Together, they transformed Gamberaia into a refuge and a beacon of quiet elegance.

While Florence entertained guests, painted Cézanne-inspired canvases, and hosted costumed dinners in the villa’s salons, Jeanne roamed the gardens, carved in stone, and oversaw every detail of their revival. Despite her reserved temperament, she was anything but detached: she offered aid and medicine to the villagers of Settignano, and was quietly adored for her generosity.

Yet myths gathered around her like morning mist. Some said she wandered the gardens at dusk veiled in gauze, avoiding mirrors, perhaps fearing the signs of age. It is said that when her beauty began to fade, she had all the mirrors removed from the house. Bernard Berenson, the art historian and frequent guest, called her a “narcissist,” wholly absorbed in her appearance — but his judgment perhaps betrayed more about his own discomfort with female autonomy than her true nature.

What is certain is that under her care, Villa Gamberaia became a meeting point for the international elite of the arts and letters: Leo and Nina Stein, Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood, Edward Bruce, Léon Bakst, Adolf von Hildebrand, Egisto Fabbri, Charles Loeser, Arthur Acton, and of course, Berenson himself. From nearby Villa I Tatti to Poggio Gherardo and Villa Medici, the hills between Settignano and Fiesole pulsed with an extraordinary cultural energy.

Yet Ghyka's most enduring legacy is the garden — or rather, her garden. It was she who radically reimagined the traditional parterre de broderie, replacing it with a parterre d’eau: a daring move at the time, considered almost heretical by garden purists. That a woman, and a foreigner no less, would alter the Italian formal garden with reflective pools seemed an affront to tradition. And yet, her vision — lyrical, serene, and rigorously modern — transformed the Gamberaia gardens into a living mirror of sky and stone, a place of timeless beauty that would go on to inspire generations of landscape designers around the world. She was assisted in this venture by the gardener Martino Porcinai, whose devotion to the property was later mirrored by his son, Pietro Porcinai, destined to become one of the greatest landscape architects of 20th-century Italy.

Today, Gamberaia is inseparable from the memory of its visionary mistress — “la Ghyka” as she is still affectionately called in the Villa. Her spirit lingers in the light that skims the stone basins at sunset, in the geometry of box hedges and mirrored waters, and in the sense of contemplative grace that suffuses every corner of the estate.