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?