The Val d’Orcia was wild and inhospitable when, in the 1920s, Marquis Antonio Origo moved here with his Anglo-American wife Iris Cutting, who had grown up with her mother Sybil at Villa Medici, in Fiesole. They transformed an estate that was run-down, its buildings long abandoned, into a place of enchantment. Antonio dedicated himself to getting the estate back up and running, hiring farmhands and restoring output; around the enlarged and restored building, Iris designed a garden inspired by Tuscan Renaissance tradition, created in multiple phases until 1939, working with Cecil Pinsent, a sensitive and cultured English landscape architect. The first formal garden in front of the residence, with a fountain and green grotto hidden beneath a laurel dome, was in place by 1927. Next came a geometrically planted Lemon Garden, where boxwood spheres prevail. A lower level is a monumental geometric garden with large box hedges, enclosed within the high walls of cypress trees, ending in a pool and a 17th-century Venetian statue representing prosperity; this in turn is connected by a staircase in Rapolano travertine to a grotto. Special openings in the cypress “wall” allow glimpses of the surrounding landscape. A long, wisteria arbor on the uphill section, a rose garden with lavender borders and herbaceous perennials, among which aubretiaand alyssumstand out, add notes of colour to the geometric greenery. A particularly panoramic viewpoint out over the Val d’Orcia beckons along a wisteria-clad pergola.