Charles Latham's gardens of Italy

"In the spring of 1903, Country Life's first staff photographer, Charles Latham, set off from London's Victoria station with his large-format camera and several boxes of fragile glass negatives bound for Rome. He spent the months that followed photographing some of Italy's finest historic gardens. Latham's photographs were immediately acclaimed and the images are characteristic of his work in their exceptional clarity. As a result of the political turmoil that overtook Italy in the nineteenth century, many of the gardens had already fallen into a state of picturesque decrepitude; others, around Florence, had been taken over by English and American expatriates and were in the process of restoration. Today, many of these gardens have vanished, destroyed by social upheaval and war, though a few were painstakingly restored in the post-war years."--Global Books in Print.