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. Helena Attlee has made Italy and its gardens her special subject for over twenty years. A leading authority on garden history, she writes for a range of journals and magazines, lectures widely, and leads specialist tours to Italy, France and Portugal. She is the author of several books, including Italian Gardens, A Cultural History (2006).


