One of Edith Wharton's earliest memories was playing as a little girl in the Roman Forum. Soon after the Civil War her parents temporarily abandoned the upper-class landscape of Fifth Avenue and Rhinebeck, New York for the continent. In her autobiography Wharton wrote of wandering "on the springy turf of great Roman villas." Italy was now "ineradicably in one's blood."
In 1902 the Century magazine asked Wharton to write a series of articles about Italian villas and their gardens. She had already mined the Italian scene in her 1902 novel, The Valley of Decision.
Wharton visited some fifty villas around Rome, Florence, Siena, Genoa, in Lombardy and the Veneto. Many were closed to the public. "At first I found it difficult to get helpful information from Italians,"she later wrote. "A 'garden' to them still meant a humpy lawn with oval beds of cannas encircling a banana-plant, and I wasted a good deal of time before learning that I must ask for ‘giardini tagliati.'"
In Florence, the writer Vernon Lee organized a "prodigious number"of expeditions for her friends. In the garden of a villa near Siena, Percy Lubbock sighted Wharton. "There was Edith, bright and alert,"he wrote, "brisk on her feet after a winged glance."
Wharton's winged glance went deep. The book's guiding theme is that the garden "must be studied in relation to the house and both in relation to the landscape." At the Villa d'Este she wrote that "the solemn depths of green reverberate with the tumult of innumerable streams."
Wharton returned to New York in 1903. She began work on The House of Mirth, the novel that would establish her reputation.
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