THE OTHER ORSINI GARDEN

Pitigliano is a beautiful hilltown in the Maremma, Tuscany, once ruled by the Orsini family, the great door of whose castle, above, is an exuberant piece of renaissance carving like the town fountain (top right, with an Orsini bear holding their shield) probably made in the 1490's for conte Nicolo, a renowned condottiero. Perhaps as their cousin Vicino Orsini created his famous Bosco Sacro at Bomarzo in the 1550's, these Orsini made a large and strange garden on the breezy hill opposite the town, of which only tantalising traces remain. The place is known locally as Poggio Strozzoni (strangler's hill) after Orso Orsini, another condottiero, strangled his wife there in 1575. Below: looking back across the ravine to the town from the sometime-garden hill.

The whole top of the hill is perfectly flat, covered in a tangle of trees and smallholdings, but once, presumably, a formal garden of great scale. On the wooded sides of the hill is a series of survivals from what seems to have been a 'wilderness' garden, like the moss-covered, carved stone torso of a man on a great, flat rock, above. Further on are strange little roofed seats carved from tufa, below, looking oddly like municipal bus shelters:

Above left, another seat, with dividing arms that look as though they were once finely carved, and a cornice above; right, a single throne, badly eroded and mossy. One description I found calls these seats for watching hunts, but that seems unlikely; I imagine courtly love poems whispered through the little windows of the 'bus shelters', instead. At the end of the hill, below, a bare, rocky promontory sticks out over the junction of two valleys, falling off in a sheer drop; on the right, more seats with post-holes in their backs that, I imagine, once held banners or tent-posts. A mysterious and fascinating place.