The first changes to the garden were made by Giovanni di Jacopo Corsi, who died in 1571, grandson of the same Simone who purchased the estate. From the large amount of data found in the files of the historical archive, with payments to plumbers, brick kilns, stone masons and sculptors, it can be deduced that In those years, the garden can be described as an enclosed area, probably subdivided as follows: a garden, a vegetable garden that also includes a ‘wild’ part (that is, a patch of evergreens) and an orchard, a sign of the high rank of the family as cultivated fruit was almost exclusively a princely food. Each of these three parts had its own source of water.
The Medici gardens
On the subject of the fruit trees in the garden of the Villa di Sesto, we should not forget that Eleanor of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de’ Medici and “creator” of the Boboli Garden with Tribolo and Fortini, had “frutticini”, low grown fruit trees planted from the very beginning. The splendid Medici gardens, such as Boboli, and then Castello and Petraia, clearly had an influence on the Corsi family, who seem to be competing with them in the design of their Villa. Along with the fruit trees citrus fruits were also grown, which the Medici had first started planting in the 1540s in their Villa in Fiesole, and which from then on became a must for all the great families.
