Villa Gregoriana

A pope's flood-defence tunnel turned the Aniene into a waterfall and gave Tivoli a romantic park. Below the ancient temples, paths drop past water-carved grottoes, the ruins of a villa praised by Statius and deep woodlands to a cascade more than a hundred metres high.

Why it matters

Tivoli stands where the Aniene river quits the Apennine foothills, and for centuries the river destroyed the town whenever it chose. Between 1832 and 1835, Pope Gregory XVI settled the matter with an engineering work the operator describes as unprecedented: two tunnels driven straight through Monte Catillo that diverted the floodwaters. The water that had battered the houses now plunged into the gorge beneath them, and the pope's engineers turned the gorge into a park. Tivoli's river landscape had long attracted Grand Tour writers and painters, and the new park became part of that tradition — then declined through the twentieth century until the FAI, Italy's National Trust, took it over in 2002 and reopened it in 2005. It is that rare place built by hydraulic engineering that ended up looking entirely wild.

What to notice

The centrepiece announces itself by sound before sight: the Cascata Grande, where the whole Aniene funnels out of the mountainside and falls more than a hundred metres into the gorge — by the operator's ranking, second in Italy only to the Marmore falls near Terni. Above it, the water has done its own sculpting: the Grotta di Nettuno and the Grotta delle Sirene are caverns carved into the limestone by the river itself, while the Traforetto, a narrower bore, was cut by human hands. Paths thread through the Valle dell'Inferno — the Valley of Hell, a name the romantic designers wore as a compliment — among seventy-four recorded tree species. In the undergrowth lie the ruins of the riverside villa of Manilius Vopiscus, the Roman grandee whose estate the poet Statius described in the Silvae. Look up from the gorge: the acropolis above the park carries the rectangular and circular temples of ancient Tibur, drawn by Palladio and Serlio when they surveyed the site.

Context and history

The park exists because the river kept breaking the town. In 1832 Gregory XVI ordered a double tunnel cut through Monte Catillo to contain the Aniene, and once the water was mastered the pope had the gorge landscaped in the fashionable romantic manner, inaugurating the park that bears his name in 1835. For the rest of the century it was a required stop for travellers on the Grand Tour, and painters and writers made the falls the defining image of Tivoli. After the Second World War the site passed to the Italian state, and decades of neglect and hydrogeological damage followed. In 2002 the state property agency handed the park to the FAI on concession; the trust cleared the choked paths, restored the planted slopes and reopened the park to the public in 2005. The temples on the acropolis above predate all of it by two millennia: the rectangular one, of about 150 BC, is attributed to Hercules or to the legendary founder Tiburno, and the circular one, of about 100 BC, to the cult of the Sibyl — though neither dedication is certain.