The journey out was through a dreary light-industrial, poor part of Rome, the other face of Italy that the coffee-table books don't show you. Car dealerships, graffiti, road works, tacky shops and pizza places - modern buildings but badly built and unattractive.
The Villa d'Este in the town of Tivoli is the complete antithesis of these. The gardens are particularly famous for their use of water. Spouts, fountains, gushers, cascades, squirts, pools, rills and grottoes are all here in abundance. Each garden "room" is built around a water feature of some kind. The garden and villa were created by Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, the son of Lucrezia Borgia and her third husband, the Duke of Ferrara. Ippolito had the nearby river diverted into the garden and used the steep hillside setting to provide spectacular cascades and fountains. Later, Franz Liszt composed his piano pieces "Cypresses of the Villa d'Este" and "Fountains of the Villa d'Este" while living here.
View of Tivoli from the villa balcony
Fresco on the ceiling of the 'Moses' room, showing Moses striking the rock to obtain water - appropriate for a water garden. (The weird things with nipples behind him are tents, took me a while to work that out).
Lovely spring day
Maybe my new Facebook avatar?
One of the ancient cypresses framing the spring sky.
The Dragon fountain - my favourite
This is the famous water-organ that plays a tune when water rushes through it.
Just the place for a long summer lunch. This garden would have been a wonderfully cool retreat from the summer heat of Rome.
Oh wow. Though all that rushing, gushing, trickling water would have had its impact on me.
ReplyDeleteA much, much nicer way to remember and think of the Borgias though. Thank you.