Villa Medicia Ambra, Poggio a Caiano

Lorenzo the Magnificent commissioned his favourite architect, Giuliano da Sangallo, to build this villa, the most important of many Medici villas round Florence. The temple front incorporated into the façade was the first time this had been done during the Renaissance. Lorenzo loved this place. This was where he came to ride, to hawk, to admire his favourite racehorses, to plant mulberry trees and to write bucolic poetry about the delights of the surrounding countryside. It became a centre of humanism and Lorenzo used to hold his Platonic Academy here. His son, the pleasure-loving Pope Leo X, commissioned the leading Florentine artists to paint the salone of the villa. The most delightful scene is by the young Jacopo Pontormo. His fresco of Vertumnus and Pomona, painted in 1521 is a pastoral idyll, with ladies enjoying a picnic and a youth leaning back to pick grapes from a vine.

DIRECTIONS:
Between Florence and Pistoia on the no.66 road