Shortly before the middle of the fourteenth century, Giovanni Villani declared that the "wealthy, noble and leisured Florentines" were in the habit of spending four or more months a year with their families in the country, where they had built sumptuous residences, so elegant as to rival the splendid mansions they owned in the city. It would therefore appear that a ritual and practice that we are accustomed to thinking of as much more recent was already well-established at this time.
In effect, from the thirteenth century on the investments in the rural district made by the Florentine ruling classes - and in general by the Tuscan notables in all those places that enjoyed a similarly florid growth - are confirmed by the literary sources and by the evidence that still survives.
Real estate was seen as a secure investment into which to channel the surplus of profits yielded by an economy of a proto-capitalist nature. The marked spread of gentlemen's residences, and later of villas, built in the surroundings of Florence is eloquent visual evidence of this phenomenon. For the affluent middle classes and the aristocracy, the sojourn in the country villa for more or less lengthy periods became a practice that has survived up to the present.
The time spent in these attractive suburban residences was divided between the management of the property and of the agricultural activities, literary pastimes derived from the classical tradition and pleasant diversions. Within the rural landscape the villa assumed the role of a fulcrum in a territory increasingly marked by the human presence through the centuries-long labour of man, and contributed to define its new image.
The exhibition set up at the Medici Villa of Cerreto Guidi is intended to investigate the cultural and ideological aspects that qualified the villa system between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, from the age of Humanism up to the post-unification period. The proposed itinerary is based on images, in the shape of works loaned by the leading museums of the Polo Fiorentino, by other prestigious institutions and through outstanding loans from private collections.