Hello and welcome to Outward, Slate's podcast about queer life, queer politics, and the little gay nuggets of history you didn't even know to ask about.

I'm Christina Cotarucci, a senior writer at Slate, and this week, I'm taking you back in time to an Italian villa just outside Florence.

The villa Gambariah was built in the early 1600s, and after a few

hundred years, by the turn of the 20th century, it was basically in a state of neglect until two

lesbians came along and renovated it. A Romanian princess, Catherine Gika, bought the villa in 1896 and moved in with

her lover, an American artist named Florence Blood. And together, they built a spectacular

garden on the grounds and turned it into a destination where they hosted parties and salons for

women who lived in the area or would travel to be

there. Today, the gardens of Gambariah provide a little snapshot of a queer community from a

century ago that most people don't know much about. And according to Kate Thomas, a professor of

English literature and queer

studies at Brinmore College, in the design of those gardens, there's queer symbolism and meaning

and openings for questions about lesbian life. Kate has gone really deep in her study of this

estate. She gave a brilliant lecture at Harvard about the Villa Gambariah a couple years ago. It was called Lesbian Arcadia, Desire and Design in the Fonda Cieckla Garden. And I'm so pleased to have her as a guest this week on the show. We'll be back with Kate after a quick break.

We're back with Kate Thomas, a professor at Bridmore College, here to enlighten me on the lesbian gardens of Fonda Siacla Florence. Kate, it's so great to meet you.

It's lovely to meet you, too. I just drew the barest sketch of what the Villa Gamberaya was under the stewardship of Princess Gika and Florence Blood.

Can you paint more of a detailed picture for our listeners of, you know, what this place was, what they did with it, and, you know, what was the significance of their renovation?

So first off, we have to understand that the hillsides around Florence were beautiful Renaissance villas, that by the end of the 19th century had been really abandoned and neglected, and their former glory had just turned to rack and

ruin. And what we see in Italy at this time is an interest taken in these kinds of ghosted, ruined places by colonies of women,

artists, writers, gardeners, who are intent on forging their lives together and producing a

sort of new, rooted self. I really trace this back to the mid-century when an American

actress called Charlotte Cushman starts a colony in Rome, not Florence, but, and she designs what

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