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Villa La Pietra is a renaissance villa in the hills outside Florence, in Tuscany in central Italy. It was formerly the home of Arthur Acton and later of his son Harold Acton, on whose death in 1994 it was bequeathed to New York University. ==History== Villa La Pietra was bought and somewhat modified in the 1460s by the Florentine banker Francesco Sassetti. In 1545 or 1546 it was sold to the . The villa was given its present form in the seventeenth century by the cardinal Luigi Capponi, possibly with the assistance of Carlo Fontana. During the brief period when Florence was capital of the Kingdom of Italy, the villa was used as the embassy of Prussia. In 1903 Arthur Acton, an Anglo-Neapolitan art dealer, rented it after his marriage to Hortense Mitchell, the daughter of a banker from Chicago, Illinois, William Mitchell. With money from her family, the couple bought the villa in 1907. The villa contains the art collection assembled by the Actons, which reflects twentieth-century Anglo-American taste. It is used for didactic purposes by New York University. The collection includes works from the circle of Giotto, Romanesque sculptures, a relief of the ''Virgin and Child'' by Donatello, and fifteenth-century tapestries made for the de' Medici family. Between 1905 and 1930 the gardens of the villa were substantially altered by the Actons, only the walled lemon garden to the north-west of the villa remaining mostly unchanged since the time of Luigi Capponi. The Actons laid out a formal Baroque Italian garden with extensive stonework, including almost two hundred statues, many of them by the Venetian sculptors Orazio Marinali and Antonio Bonazza, brought to Florence from the villas of the Brenta. The gardens were restored in the early years of the twenty-first century. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Villa La Pietra」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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