Evelina Pisani Van Millingen

Born to an English father and a French mother, Countess Evelina was brought up with a cosmopolitan education. In 1853, she married Count Almorò III Pisani, the last descendant of the family that commissioned the Villa in Stra. Widowed when still young, Evelina dwelled at the Vescovana Villa-estate near Padua, and worked to improve the lot of the nearby village. Henry James was fascinated by the countess. An energetic administrator as well as a cultured, up-to-date woman, at Vescovana she received sovereigns including the Empress of Germany, and intellectuals such as John Addington Symonds, whose daughter gave an account of the aristocratic yet informal atmosphere at the Villa in her book,
“Days spent on a Doge’s Farm”. From 1892 onwards, Evelina undertook a redesign of the whole garden, adapting it to the “modern English taste”, one that was in actual fact a synthesis between the geometric template of the “Italian style” garden and the principles of the Anglo-Saxon “formal garden” popularized by Reginald Blomfield, who that very year had published his book, “The Formal Garden in England”, sending for bulbs and seeds from across the Channel.

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