The recently restored 18th-century gardens of the Villa La Quiete, on the Castello hill, near Florence, will be open to the public for the first time on May 16, 2025. The last descendant of the Medici family, the Electress Palatine Anna Maria Luisa, like other grand duchesses before her, lived in the villa from 1720 until 1730. During that time, she commissioned the architects Giovanni Battista Foggini and Paolo Giovannozzi to restore the villa, as well as the Boboli Gardens gardener Sebastiano Rapi to create the geometric Italian garden, featuring the Lepricine fountain, a lemon house and the park. She also had many botanical and fruit species that Anna Maria Luisa had brought from some of the Medici villas planted there.
Seventy years before the Electress Palatine arrived at La Quiete, the villa and its grounds had been home to the Ancille della SS. Trinità (Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity), a lay religious “congregation”, known as conservatories, whose purpose was to educate and “conserve” the virginity and honour of their young female residents. In this case, the girls from noble families entered the conservatory between five and seven years of age. Like nuns, the girls wore black habits. They weren’t cloistered, but without taking vows before a priest, they promised obedience to the superiors within the congregation. When their education was complete, they were free to decide their future, whether that was marriage, becoming a nun or remaining at the conservatory and dedicating their life to prayer and the schooling of future generations. This conservatory (and another for underprivileged girls at Il Conventino) was established in 1626, almost two and a half decades before La Quiete. Both were founded by Eleonora Ramirez de Montalvo, who also wrote the constitution of the congregation of Villa La Quiete, which was approved by the Archbishop of Florence. The community of the Montalvos, as they came to be known, would last almost 300 years, unlike many other religious institutions that were suppressed or closed down during that same period.
Eleonora Ramirez de Montalvo was born in Genoa on July 6, 1602, the daughter of Elisabetta Torrebianca (or Buti or Basi, her surname is uncertain) and Giovanni Montalvo, who married two years after she was born. Her grandfather, Don Antonio Montalvo, was a Spanish nobleman who, in his role as a page to the cardinal of Burgos, Don Giovanni di Toledo, lived in the Ramirez de Montalvo palace at borgo Albizi 26. The family also owned Villa Montalvo, a country home near Campi Bisenzio, and an estate in Sassetta in the province of Livorno. Elisabetta was widowed when Eleonora was only five years old. When she turned nine, her mother sent her to be educated by the Poor Clares in the Florentine convent of San Jacopo in via Ghibellina, where she would remain for nine years until her family forced her to marry Orazio Landi in August 1620. Apparently, the marriage was never consummated and, after five years, the couple separated by mutual consent, although they never divorced and remained on good terms until his death.
After acquiring the La Quiete property, Eleonora moved in with 18 girl boarders and two ladies to care for them. From the beginning, she received the protection and support, especially routine financial aid, from the Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere (1622-94). Her far-sighted ideas for the education of the girls in her care are set out in her Istruzione alle maestre (Instruction for Teachers) and in the anonymous 18th-century account of life at La Quiete, titled Le Regole per le Montalve (Rules for the Montalvos). The students were taught about Christian doctrine and spirituality based on the ideas of Ignatius of Loyola, including the practice of mental meditation three times a day. The pupils were expected to go to weekly confession, attend communion frequently, pray regularly and practice self-mortification rituals like fasting and self-flagellation, thought to purify the spirit. Eleonora herself was assiduous in carrying out these rituals and she is said to have worried Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere with her excessive fasting.
In addition to their religious preparation, the girls were taught how to read and write, and were given a cultural and artistic education. They were also taught domestic skills, something quite extraordinary for young women of their station at the time, and instructed on how to behave in society.
Not only was Eleonora an enlightened educator, she was a talented author, penning poetry, letters, the lives of some of the saints, religious plays and numerous other works, including her autobiography, which she wrote in the poetic form of terza rima, the form of rhyming that Dante invented for his Divine Comedy.
Greatly weakened physically, Eleonora died aged 57 on August 10, 1659, leaving her Ancille to become custodians of her heritage and literary works. She was buried in the Il Conventino church in via dell’Amore until she was transferred and entombed in the Most Blessed Trinity church at La Quiete in October 1688, in the presence of Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere.
