Collodi Butterfly House (Casa delle Farfalle), Garzoni Garden

The Collodi estate belonged to the Garzoni family from 1366. One Romano Garzoni signed a design for a palace in 1633; in 1652 the garden was enlarged and laid out in Italian-style terraces, with stairways, statues and fountains, to suit the steep slope. In 1793, at the behest of another Romano Garzoni, the Lucca architect Ottaviano Diodati gave the garden the hydraulic system that still powers its water features. The property passed in 1871 to Senator Giuseppe Garzoni Venturi, then to his daughters and in the 1930s to the Gardi counts, before being bought by an entrepreneur in 2000 and sold in 2004 to a holding company.

The new owners launched a programme to restore the villa and garden, in which the Butterfly House is the only piece of contemporary architecture. Commissioned by the company Villa e Giardino Garzoni, it was designed in 2005 by Emilio Faroldi and Maria Pilar Vettori of Emilio Faroldi Associati and built in 2006-2007 on the site of the garden's historic greenhouses, on the eastern side of the park; the project sheet describes it as the conversion of an existing greenhouse. It opened in 2007 and is run by Sviluppo Turistico Collodi.

The building is made of two contrasting volumes. The first, a glazed prism of varying height, contains the greenhouse-museum; its envelope is entirely glass, carried by a structural-glass system of the spider-glass type, with steel beams supporting the roof. It admits as much daylight as possible, which the butterflies need to survive. The second, an opaque stone-clad cube, holds the services; on its east side a wall of exposed reinforced concrete is pierced by two glazed openings framing the Tuscan landscape.

The greenhouse covers 392 m² and the services block 68 m², for 460 m² in all. Inside, the floor steps down in a series of terraces about 60 cm apart. The architects rotated the whole slightly so that it echoes the orientation of the villa's main facade along the garden's east-west scenic axis. Temperature and humidity are fully controlled.

The greenhouse was designed for around 5,000 butterflies from tropical and equatorial regions, flying freely among visitors. So that the insects can complete their whole life cycle, the design gives generous space to planting: shrubs, water lilies, aquatic plants and tropical species form a suitable habitat spread across the stepped floor.

The building is more than a display space: it is also used to catalogue the species and present them in museum form, and the services block includes a video room for educational screenings. The sources consulted give no list of the butterfly or plant species.

The Butterfly House lies on the eastern side of the Villa Garzoni garden; visitors enter through the stone cube, which houses the ticket desk and shop. The humid warmth of the greenhouse makes a contrast with a walk through the baroque terraces, along the central axis, past the mosaic-decorated stairways, the nymphaeum, the green theatre and the labyrinth.

Half a day allows an unhurried visit to both the garden and the greenhouse. From the upper terraces the contrast is plain between the seventeenth-century layout and the glass prism, turned to line up with the villa's facade.