VILLA LANTE

Of all Italian gardens, Villa Lante is the most perfect and magical to visit. It’s special to me since I was able to take my father there just a year before his death; he’d never seen it and was thrilled. In the heat of August, with sparkling, rushing water running through it, chilled from its volcanic spring, I realized for the first time how wonderful all the Indian Moghul gardens, that I had only seen dry, arid and with almost no plants, must once have been. The garden was built from 1566 on, by Vignola, as a summer retreat for Cardinal Gambara, Bishop of Viterbo, who entered it with his guests through the arch, above, seen beyond the parterre with its pool, stone boats, central island and Fountain of the Moors. Below, looking up the hill from the pool, with one of the twin pavilions that formed the villa itself. Ordinary visitors, then as now, entered from the side, next to the fountain of Pegasus, middle below, originally set in a wilderness around Cardinal Riario’s old hunting lodge; the wilderness is now, sadly, a tidy municipal park instead of the garden’s rough counterpart.

Above left, two views up and down the skillfully contrived stream of water, the central thread of the whole design, with the great stone dining table where the guests of Gambara (and Montalto, his successor) could eat, the inset water channel cooling their wine – or having plates of delicacies and oil lamps floated down it? Above right and below, the river gods of the Tiber and the Arno mark the edge of middle terrace from which the water-chain runs through the claws of a giant shrimp or gambero, the Cardinal’s emblem. The picture above shows the water working well in 1997; below, after ten years of growth and decay.

Above left, the Fountain of the Lamps; right, the balustrade above the river gods, where water once spouted from the mask on the urn, caught by the console bracket below. The inventiveness, beauty of line, and sheer sense of fun is an amazing combination. Originally, there were many hidden, surprise giochi d’acqua – water games – although I’m not sure if crude practical jokes would really have done much for the beauty of the place. The top terrace, below, has twin open pavilions flanking a grotto pool whose rough walls once ran with water, while the ancient, gnarled forms of the plane trees suggest the great age of this exquisite place.