Italy 2024

We took two buses up into the hills northeast of Florence to go to Parco Mediceo di Pratolino/Villa Demidoff. This was originally a villa and the surrounding grounds of the Medici family, who conceived of it as a “garden of dreams,” with elaborate/bizarre sculptures, fountains, and grottoes. Kind of a 15th century Disneyland. It was sold and many of those features were lost until Demidoff, a Russian aristocrat, bought it and restored some of them. It’s now a park, and those remaining sculptures are just surreal.Read more