Villa D'Este

Why is Villa D'Este not all over Pinterest?

At a girlfriend's wedding in Sorrento, another guest suggested a day trip from Rome to check out this awesome water garden in Tivoli.  For the gardening/engineering inclined, this place easily trumps the heavily touristed attractions within the city limits.  Normally, I abstain from photos, but this time I couldn't resist.

tl;dr a Cardinal in the running for Papacy decided to drown his loss by decking out his hillside govenor's mansion with some serious hydroponics (1550-72).

I had to walk to the other end of the property to capture this one in its full glory (better pro pictures here).  It is the culmination of 3 terraces and 2 fountain installations.  Having just come from St Peter's in the Vatican the day before, the top fountain (Fontane Dell'Organo) struck me as run of the mill ornate.  However, in its heyday, it was a water-powered organ, thus elevating its status to Epic.

Behind the falls, there is a second terrace you can cross.  There are 3 grottos behind the falls, each with their own fountain.  This made for some rad mid-day A/C, but was a bit too loud to carry on a conversation.  All the same, it was amusing to picture fussy Shakespearean era ladies cruising around the gardens in fashionable, if not entirely functional attire.

I also managed to capture an awesome triple rainbow from one of the two turrets on that second tier (the middle of the Fontane di Nettuno), despite my suboptimal 3 megapixel vintage iPhone camera.

At the bottom level is a series of pools (peschiera) with some heavy duty carp.  These guys are arm-length+.  Inside the Villa, the exhibits were focused on food during Rinascimento.  From what little I could understand of the Italian program, the kitchen of this property could put together a pretty serious spread, so I wonder if they actually fished these guys up and cooked them.  After reading about the chicken's Southeast Asian roots in my "On Food and Cooking" book last night, it was also pretty neat to see medieval sketches of the typical poultry of the region (with a quail-like crest) and something exotic called Indian gallus, which looked suspiciously like our modern chicken.  Despite the well-stocked fish pond, I still managed to get a couple mosquito bites in my reverie.  I guess this is to be expected with so many water features for expectant mosquito mothers to choose from.

This massive ferny trough was also pretty impressive.  Le Cento Fontane (100 fountains).  While I was thinking that if a setup like this didn't get too hot, it might make an excellent tank for trout, MacGyver was noticing that the ones on one end of the causeway seemed to have more water pressure.  Could have been attributable to the gaping 101st "fountain" which we found midway.  Tivoli is a giant hill and Cardinal Ippolito was savvy to realize that this landscape held great hydroponic promise.  Even so, the amount of planning that had to go into getting a works like this into equilibrium without the help of pumps and what not is pretty astonishing.  

We'd been brainstorming ways to feed a more modest (affordable) system with greywater, rain water, and the like.  My concern was that all the lint and debris coming out of the wash would gum up the system, but a banister like this might provide some basic filtration and complete the look of our cement back steps....




If swimming pools could look like this, I would understand why people take the trouble.  Not sure if the sanitary effects of chlorine fully offset the awesomeness of having mossy ferny walls for landscaping.  Perhaps a modern rendering wouldn't turn out quite as awesome because a lot of the sculptures and raised beds were cut out of corral which is a bit of a faux pas to harvest these days.  Judging by its depth, people probably didn't actually swim in Fontana dell'Ovato, but how rad would it be to have a second story semicircular catwalk you could dive off of or lounge in the shady arcade behind the falls on the ground level?

Sprinklers, Blinds and Hops

Some updates:

• Sprinklers installed in the front yard. Hopefully the barren wasteland look will be a thing of the past. Still need to get the back half by the star pine.

• Replaced the blackout blinds in the dining room. Reused the bamboo blind as it fit perfectly across the two windows and only took slight modification to fit on the existing brackets.

• Fully harvested the Saaz hops. 18oz total which is pretty good for a first year plant. Cloned a start of it for a buddy at work. Also hope to clone more and get them on the perimeter fence.

• Mounted some mirrors in the 'greenhouse'. Belle has set up an office there because it has been so hot.

Bonus Material -- Details of Installing A Skylight on an old zero degree roof:

I had relatively no idea how to do this moving into the project and the instructions given by the manufacturer while helpful mainly focused on ehhh newer construction. There were some good takeaways but some gripes as well (why don't you just tell me what to cut my 2x4's to instead of giving the outside dimension?). Anyhow I first built the frame and verified the skylight fit. Then I investigated the roof, which turned out to be tongue and groove 3/4" redwood with a 3/8" particle board mat on top which the shingles were nailed to. I measured the spot to put the skylight and drilled 4 1/2" starter holes at each corner. I then went up to the roof and traced the inside diameter of the frame on the shingles. I then cut a massive hole in our roof. At this point I became very timid to step on the area between the hole and the edge of the roof, as the only support (at the time) was the grooves and the wall. I would recommend this to others as well, there is no need to risk it, so keep to the solid side. I then cut back the shingles about 3" around the entire hole and pulled it up so I could slip the underlayment and the flashing under it. The flashing kit that was built for the specific skylight while expensive was worth it as it fits extremely well and required no modification. Prior to attaching the flashing I screwed the frame to the roof from the inside of the house. Then screwed the flashing to the frame (keep this above the level of the seal). According to the manufacturer this is enough to completely seal the skylight, but with a 0 degree roof I felt I needed to do more. I took some spare torch down tar we had left over from the wet room and a blowtorch and proceeded to go to town on that. The easiest and safest way was to do it from the inside with my torso sticking out the top while standing on a ladder. Finally I cleaned up my saw cuts with a sander and added some metal we used on the egg carton. Also skylights cost more than I expected (~450 bucks on sale).

Opossum vs Klee Kais

Klee Kais win easily. 3AM get woken up by serious barking. Rho hasn't really figured out the dog door yet, he will go through it for food but will still decide to go to the bathroom inside if he isn't let out. Yet he was outside, no doubt because he heard Kai going off like a bomb. She was in about round seven of her second fight with an opossum. She was also doing significantly better than round one, no doubt with help from her packmate Rho. Rho was busy nipping at the possums head while Kai was ferociously attacking its rear. The thing stood no chance even though it outweighed the dogs by a factor of 2. They had managed to get it completely tangled in the ivy to where its back legs couldn't move. Not really sure how I got them to back off, well Rho was easy with food but Kai wanted this thing dead. Finally I got them trapped inside the house and had to cut the possum out of the vines it was so badly trapped. Snapped a few pics before I cut him loose, much smaller than the last one Kai wrangled with solo: