EUROPE
Italy: Art springs to life in gardens near Rome
Renaissance artistry blooms at Villa Lante, Bomarzo, Ninfa and other elaborate landscapes just a drive away from the Vatican.
Bagnaia, Italy
I know how to get to paradise -- in this life, anyway.
It lies atop a hill about 60 miles north of Rome where a gentleman-cardinal built a garden in the 16th century. His architects created it from water and stone, green leaves and vine. But the result is more than the sum of its parts. Villa Lante embodies the humanist ideals of the Italian Renaissance.
For the record
Italian gardens: An article in last week's section on gardens near Rome misidentified a plant used in the clipped globes of the Orange Garden at La Landriana near Anzio, Italy, as crepe myrtle. The globes are cape myrtle, or African boxwood.
In a way, all gardens, from the lowliest patch of zinnias to a sophisticated jewel of landscape design such as Villa Lante, are postage stamps from Eden. So it is no wonder that soon after I moved to Rome last spring, I began seeking them out.
I took a Vatican Gardens tour to see the pope's beautiful backyard and saw the ingenious fountains at the Villa d'Este about 20 miles east of Rome. I found secret havens in the city -- the rose garden on the Aventine Hill, for one -- and tagged along with a group of architecture students from Yale University to visit Villa Madama, in the hills northwest of town. While the students sketched its elephant fountain, their professors told me about other gardens in the region of Lazio around Rome that attest to the evolution of garden art in Italy. Many are attached to country villas where counts and cardinals took refuge from the summer heat.
When that heat settled in, I fled the city almost every weekend, navigating my rental car to the Grande Raccordo Annulare, the ring road that encircles Rome. From there it was easy to find cool, green, consummately beautiful pieces of paradise.
Bomarzo and Villa Lante
In 1578, Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Gambara was suffering an attack of gout when Pope Gregory XIII arrived at the Villa Lante. When the pope saw Gambara's exquisite but obviously costly estate above the hamlet of Bagnaia, he canceled the cardinal's allowance.
It couldn't have been a good day for Gambara, but when I visited Villa Lante I was blessed in every way. On the drive from Rome I followed the path of the Tiber River, lined by fields of golden, just-reaped summer hay.
I turned off the highway near Orte into a landscape of volcanic hills, crater lakes and strange, eroded canyons. A winding country road took me to L'Ombricolo -- which means "the little shady spot" -- a bed-and-breakfast inn that occupies a tile-roofed farmhouse, surrounded by sunflowers.
With its vine-covered verandas and long vistas, L'Ombricolo turned out to be an Italian country idyll. Once I settled in, inn proprietor Dawne Alstrom gave me directions to Bagnaia and Bomarzo, a garden as remarkable as Villa Lante in its own weird way.
I found Bomarzo, a privately owned "garden of monsters," as it's called, in a narrow, wooded valley about a 20-minute drive from L'Ombricolo. From the parking lot it looked like a cheesy tourist attraction featuring monumental statues of dragons and sphinxes set among the trees, with no flowers to speak of.
But once I ventured in, I realized something profoundly strange was going on in the woods at Bomarzo.
Stone colossi wrestle to the death in the dell.
An elephant pinions a Roman legionnaire in its trunk, and a precariously tilted house seems to totter at the edge of a terrace.
Around the bend an ogre's head rears up, its wide-open maw revealing a tongue in the shape of a stone table where visitors can picnic while being devoured.
Art historians attribute the bizarre stone gallery, created circa 1570 by Vicino Orsini, to the rise of the Mannerist style of art that evolved after the High Renaissance. But psychology might also explain it.
Orsini was a papal soldier who retired, disillusioned, from the wars that wracked the Italian peninsula in the 16th century. At Bomarzo, I like to think he used his still-intact prankish sense of humor to vanquish his demons. Even his ravenous ogre and rampaging elephant have a benign air, inviting kids to play amid scenes of pillow-fight carnage.
I drove on to Bagnaia, set among rolling hills and vineyards. I parked by the train station, then climbed to the gate of the public park that buffers Villa Lante from the village below.
The villa began taking shape in the early 1500s as a hunting preserve entailed to the bishops of nearby Viterbo. But when Gambara gained possession in 1566 he put his own stamp on the property, creating a series of terrace gardens on the hillside. On the first level he built a pavilion out of local, whitish-green Pepperino stone. The next proprietor, Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto, gave Villa Lante its symmetry by adding a twin pavilion to Gambara's original. Painters to fresco the little palaces -- or palazetti -- were borrowed from a construction site in nearby Caprarola, where Gambara's friend, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, was building an even grander villa.
Along with the summer heat, a burgeoning interest in classical art and literature drove the luxury estate building boom in the Roman countryside. From Ovid and Pliny rich patricians found a new model for good living in the quiet seclusion of suburban villas built and decorated along ancient lines. Gardens with groves, grottoes, statues and fountains were part of the prescription for well-being.
A none-too-classical spirit of competition also existed among villa builders such as Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, who leveled the side of a hill and re-routed a river to create his opulent garden at Tivoli, a town in the mountains east of Rome. Among the garden's scores of fountains are a water-operated organ and intermittently running jets that douse surprised passersby.
Villa Lante is comparatively demure, intent on perfection, not astonishment, without the distraction of flowers and unchangingly green through the seasons.
When I passed through the gate I got a strong whiff of freshly clipped boxwood from the parterres around the Fountain of the Moors on the lower level, the interlocking hedges shaped in spirals, squares and circles with little lemon trees peeking out.
Then I turned around and saw the chain of fountains that decorates the hill. Drawn from springs in the nearby San Valentino hills, the watercourse emerges from the highest grotto, known as the Fountain of the Flood, then vanishes and reappears in pools and channels that flow between the two palazetti.
There are the Fountain of the Dolphins, richly emblazoned with the Gambara crayfish crest; the scalloping Chain Fountain, as ramblingly beautiful as any mountain stream; the long Cardinal's Table, with troughs of running water that served as finger bowls for Gambara's dinner guests; and, finally, the classic Renaissance garden on the lowest terrace.
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