History

The Importance of Italian Gardens

Through the middle ages, the green spaces in and around Rome were either wild hunting woods (boschi) or the vegetable and medicinal herb gardens (orti semplici) tended by cloistered religious communities. These monastic gardens, from the Arab tradition of a private paradise (literally, an enclosed within high walls), were full of botanical symbolism, arranged symmetrically around the water source. Medieval Italian gardens were planted, with herbs, figs, laurel and grapes in formulaic arrays.

But these humble symbolic gardens were insufficiently grand for the secular Renaissance popes. These popes communicated with mythological, rather than religious symbolism. Celebrating their return from Avignon, France, to power at the center of the world stage in Rome, the papal garden became a series of grand public outdoor rooms, starting with the grounds behind St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican in the 15th century. The same design principles were employed at the popes’ private and family residences throughout Italy for the next 200 years.

The Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque gardens were designed to impress and intimidate --- and thus were public expressions of institutional and personal power.

These extraordinary gardens, the outdoor extensions of the palace rooms, conquered much of the surrounding nature. The beds were planted with ornamental specimens, native and foreign, and were horticultural advertisements of the extent of the owner’s realm.

Roses, peonies, palm and cypress replaced vegetable beds in the sunny areas, while camellias, azaleas, and rhododendron softened the shaded corners. Box hedges, rather than harvested aromatics, divided the acreage, permanently defining the planting beds --- and thus began the culture of the par terre. This extension of the home into nature, involving plants, waterways and sculpture, is a hallmark of landscape architecture even today.

What we especially appreciate in 2008 is the continued abundance and flow of good water in these areas . Economic boom periods of Etruscan, Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance and Baroque societies always meant new construction of waterways. Many of the original hydraulic delivery and drainage systems still function today, whether originally commissioned for simple supply, defense or ostentatious display --and however many centuries ago.

Building the waterways almost always unearthed archeological treasure which inspired the contemporary artists. Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, Borromini, Goethe, Handel, and Mozart were workers and/or guests in these beautiful spaces. Here, they got to meet and work with master craftsmen and early material scientists Pozzi, Valadier, Moderno. Ligorio, and Vignola, among others.

Former guests to these gardens included history’s philosophers and social populists, like Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, Charlemagne, St. Francis, Dante, Galileo, and Queen Christina who might have met and exchanged information with other sovereign, spiritual, or adventure travelers, making the crossroads of this area the centers of influence. These same streets and crossroads are the roads we use today.

During Grand Tour days in the 18th century, the natural landscape attracted English Pleine Aire painters, who especially appreciated the good weather. These unhurried landscape paintings, with remarkable lateral shadows and depicting the romantic tumble of found antiquity in nature, were the areas’ first advertising banners, attracting Romantics from all the arts. Keats, Shelly and Byron and Russell Page and Salvador Dali all have histories here, both personally and philosophically. Many contemporary artists and artisans choose to live here today and there are Open Air painting schools, mosaic and pottery workshops, and culinary institutes throughout the countryside.

Secret Gardens Italy tours include visits to cloisters, villas, palaces, castles, and to the bosco parrasio and grand gardens that extend from them. Here lived, loved, and warred the families of the Borgia, Orsini, Farnese, della Rovere, Sciara, Odelscalchi, Torlonia, Gambara, Albani, Medici, Borghese, Barbarini and Napoleon Bonaparte’s families. They built in Rome and in the Tuscia and Etruria, which are now the villages of Bomarzo, Vignanello, Vasanello, Soriano, Nepi, Cività Castellana, Farfa, Bracciano, Viterbo, Caprarola, Sutri, and Porano.

We also visit the cloisters -- at the Castrense amphitheater, the only remaining imperial Roman amphitheater in Rome besides the Coliseum – and at San Gregorio, San Pietro, Janiculum, La Scarzuola, Sant’Onofrio and other monasteries. We visit the castle of Charlemagne, and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar’s villa in the center of Rome, and explore some modern gardens, too, at Opera Bosco, Otricoli, and Calcata, which are variations on these themes.

These timeless treasures deserve a day or two of your precious vacation time.