Vizcaya, then and now

When the industrialist James Deering bought 180 acres of seaside land in Miami in 1912 to build a winter home, the south Florida city was far from fashionable. Miami at that time was like a frontier, says Gina Wouters, the curator of the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, an extravagant mansion modelled after an 18th-century Italian villa that is now a National Historic Landmark. Most of Deerings wealthy peers were building their Florida snowbird homes further north in Palm Beach, Wouters says. There w