PERFORMANCE GRANT: 'Alii horti'. Site-specific dance at Florentine villa gardens

La Pietra and La Quiete host dance performance exploring women’s history through movement on 29 June and 2 July 2026

 Alli Horti 2026, Performance at Villa La Quiete, ph. Marco Berni

The Garden Project’s 2026 summer programme includes a student performance grant, aimed at the creation and execution of site-specific dance performances in two Florence’s most evocative monumental gardens, at Villa La Quiete and Villa La Pietra. The project and its dancers are inspired by archival studies associated with women’s history found amidst the villas’ historical documents. Themes explored through movement include female strength, sacrifice and committment to the arts.

The performances

The outdoor performance at Villa La Pietra ‘Alii horti: From books to Garden Stage’ will end the NYU summer season, and be executed as a tribute to Hortensia Acton in a style mirroring garden performances of old. Hortensia Acton played a fundamental role as patron and organiser of a unique brand of theatre that developed in Tuscan villa settings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as the avant-garde performances of Isadora Duncan, the Ballets Russes, and the stylised beauty of the Deco Movement and the Peking Opera. Other women whose stories will be included in the performance choreography include: Ortensia Capponi Incontri (1814–1844),  Maria Maddalena Frescobaldi (1771-1839), Nera Corsi Sassetti (1444-1507), Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (1406-1471). Performance date: 29 June 2026. Villa La Pietra, Via Bolognese 120, Florence.

 Alli Horti 2026, Performance at Villa La Pietra, ph. Viola Parretti

The dance performance at Villa La Quiete is entitled ‘Alii horti: Gardens for Medici Women. La Quiete – know as ‘the quiet’, was a summer home and garden beloved and cared for by three generations of Medici women (Cristina di Lorena, Vittoria della Rovere and Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici). It was also a site that provided education opportunities for secular and religious women for centuries, including the Montalve congregation and their order’s founder Eleonora Ramirez de Montalvo (1602-1659). Its recently restored garden will host a dance performance that brings together the ‘voices’ of several generations of Medici women and focus on the garden as a spiritual and cultural ‘space of one’s own’. For the evening of the performance, audiences will have the opportunity to view an ‘installation’ of Elena Pierallini Salvini’s books, in which ESP’s art stands in conversations with the villa and garden.  Performance date: 2 July 2026. Villa La Quiete, via di Boldrone 2, Florence

 Alli Horti 2026, Performance at Villa La Quiete, ph. Marco Berni

The awardees

Performance awardees, led by professional choreographer Federica Parretti, include a group of student and professional dancers and musicians, such as Sofie Robinson, a Canadian dancer and choreographer from the University of Toronto, together with dance students affiliated with Il Palmerino, Margaret Dwyer and Alva Renspie from the University of Georgia. Professional dancer Camilla Recabarren Vilchez (Argentinean, currently based in Florence) and former dancer Celia Donoso Clemente, now assistant Collections Manager at NYU, will also support the student troupe. The troupe will also include young musicians tasked with creating an original music score inspired by historic women and their garden spaces both recorded and performed live by Artemis Skarmoutsos and historic women composers like Florence Price, Luise Adolpha Le Beau and Barbara Strozzi.

Performance grant support from curators… up at the villas

First, under the guidance of Francesca Baldry, curator and archivist at the Villa La Pietra library, students will begin by studying the documents and photographs that emerged during the preparation of New York University Florence’s exhibition, ‘Behind the Mask: Performance and Identity within the Acton Mitchell Family’, curated by Baldry herself, in an attempt to ‘pull back the curtain’ on the theatrical world of Villa La Pietra. Next, awardees will explore the archives and gardens of Villa La Quiete and its multi-century history as a centre of culture and spirituality for women, with the support of the venue’s curator Rafaele Niccoli Vallesi, and in collaboration with the University of Florence (Sistema Museale di Ateneo).