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Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
November 30 @ 10:00 am EST
Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
Saturday, November 30, 10 am
3251 S Miami Ave, Miami, FL 33129
If you’re going, contact Ed Slough at wildhybrid@aol.com
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Join us for a FREE two-hour narrated tour of the home and gardens as the guest of SAGE member Jake Guin. The normal $25 admission charge is waived. There is a ramp to the first floor of the main home, but no handicap access to the second floor which is up a long stairway. We will have lunch in Coconut Grove.
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With timeless Mediterranean-style architecture, and collections dating from the early 20th-century all the way back to Pompeii, Vizcaya’s Main House was the jewel of a fledgling Miami when it was built between 1914 and 1922. |
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A century later, Vizcaya is just as relevant. It’s a cultural destination tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world each year and a hub for locals who want to learn, grow and connect in a setting that is truly “Miami’s home.” |
| Construction on the Main House at Vizcaya began in 1914, with founder James Deering taking up winter residency there for the first time on December 25, 1916. |  |
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The most outstanding of Vizcaya’s twentieth-century features is the Barge, sculpted by Alexander Stirling Calder (1870–1945). Located in the water in front of the Main House, the Barge is a monumental breakwater shaped as a boat and decorated with carvings representing mythical Caribbean creatures.
Vizcaya is proud to have been awarded a $750,000 grant from the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures grant program to support the conservation of Vizcaya’s Swimming Pool Grotto, including the preservation of the historic ceiling mural by renowned American artist Robert Winthrop Chanler. The interiors of the Main House were meant to suggest the passing of time and the layered accumulation of artifacts and memories. The rooms were designed around objects acquired in Italy and assembled into new compositions. |
| Vizcaya’s European-inspired gardens are among the most elaborate in the United States. Reminiscent of gardens created in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy and France, the overall landscape design is conceived as a series of rooms. |  |
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The central space is dominated by low hedges, or parterres, in a geometric arrangement. Beyond that are the evocative Secret Garden, the intimate Theater Garden, the playful Maze Garden and the once-watery domain of the Fountain Garden. On either side of this designed landscape, James Deering preserved the native forest.
The statues, busts, vases and urns that decorate Vizcaya’s gardens range from antiquity to the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and include modern art from Deering’s time. |