Villa d'Este

A sixteenth-century cardinal built the impossible garden on a slope above Tivoli: fountains that form water theatres, a hundred spouts along a single avenue, and a hydraulic organ powered by water. UNESCO inscribed the whole ensemble as World Heritage in 2001.

Why it matters

When Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este arrived as governor of Tivoli in 1550, the hillside of the Valle Gaudente below his residence was an unpromising tangle of slope and rock. Within a generation it held the most ambitious garden of the Renaissance: a design by the painter-archaeologist-architect Pirro Ligorio, executed by the court architect Alberto Galvani, in which the gravity-fed water of the mountain river was made to run uphill in appearance, downhill in fact, and to play music in between. The official site calls the result a masterpiece of the Italian garden, with fountains, nymphaea, grottoes and hydraulic music arranged as a single iconological programme. Nearly every later water garden in Europe learned from it, and visiting it today still means watching water do things water is not supposed to do.

What to notice

The garden's design descends from the palace through a sequence of fountains. The Viale delle Cento Fontane runs a hundred spouts along one low wall and ends at the Fontana dell'Ovato, also called the Fontana di Tivoli and counted among the garden's "water theatres" by the destination portal. Nearby, the Rometta presents a sculpted Rome with its enthroned personification, facing the Ovato across the axis. The Fontana dei Draghi marks the garden's monster imagery, and the Fontana di Nettuno anchors the lower lawn. The Fontana dell'Organo's hydraulic organ and the water-driven mechanisms of the Fontana degli Uccelli demonstrate the garden's musical effects. The Fontana del Bicchierone is a later addition attributed to Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The palace contains fresco cycles by leading late-Roman Mannerist painters, while its terraces frame the plain toward Rome, which the garden's iconography subtly invokes.

Context and history

Ippolito II d'Este — son of Alfonso I of Ferrara and Lucrezia Borgia — wanted a residence worthy of the courts of Ferrara and Rome, and after 1560 the programme for the garden was fully clarified. Ligorio supplied the archaeological and iconographic scheme; Galvani built it. At the cardinal's death in 1572 the complex was close to complete, after which came two centuries of mixed fortune: seventeenth-century additions, then decline, and the dispersal of the statue collection — figures of Olympian gods, a Hercules Saxanus protecting Tivoli and colossal Egyptian sculptures, sold off in the eighteenth century by the financially pressed Este of Modena. A revival came under Cardinal Gustav Adolf von Hohenlohe, who restored the gardens and hosted Franz Liszt, who wrote some of his late piano pieces here. The Italian state acquired the villa in the aftermath of the First World War, and the restorations of the 1920s and 1930s opened it to the public in roughly its present form. UNESCO inscribed it in 2001.