Discover Sacro Bosco

The Sacro Bosco -- the Sacred Grove, known to most people as the Park of the Monsters -- is a Mannerist complex in a wooded valley below the Orsini castle at Bomarzo, in northern Lazio. Larger-than-life sculptures, some of them carved from the bedrock where it stands, are set among the natural vegetation along with small buildings. It was made in the sixteenth century; the design is attributed to Pirro Ligorio and the sculptures to Simone Moschino.

Bomarzo is Mannerist, and the design is attributed to Pirro Ligorio -- the same architect credited with the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, which is the most useful fact about it. Ligorio's other garden is an axis imposed on a hillside with five hundred jets obeying it. This one has no axis at all.

That is the architectural argument rather than a failure of one. The statues are strewn almost at random, unconnected to any rational plan, and the intention was to astonish rather than to please -- which is a Mannerist position taken to its limit, since the whole point of a sixteenth-century garden was normally to demonstrate that nature could be made to obey geometry. It has been proposed that the Sacro Bosco was built as a deliberate foil to exactly that, to the symmetry of the great gardens a short distance away at Villa Lante and the Villa Farnese. The reason for the layout is not recorded, so the proposal stays a proposal.

Two actual buildings stand in the garden and both are jokes about architecture. The Casa Pendente, beside a formal exit gate, is a small watchtower-like casina built deliberately out of true, so that a visitor walking into it loses their footing against walls that are plumb to nothing. The Temple of Eternity at the top is the opposite: an octagon, correct and composed, but mixing classical, Renaissance and Etruscan manners in one elevation rather than committing to any of them.

It was carved where it stood. Many of the larger-than-life figures were cut from the bedrock in place rather than made elsewhere and installed, which is why the park reads as a landscape with things in it instead of a landscape with things on it, and why the figures sit at odd heights and angles -- the rock decided.

It was commissioned out of grief, in the sixteenth century. Pier Francesco Orsini, called Vicino, a condottiero and patron of the arts, was devoted to his wife Giulia Farnese -- not the Giulia Farnese who was Alexander VI's mistress, but her great-niece on the maternal side. When she died he had the garden built to cope with it. The design is attributed to Pirro Ligorio, the sculpture to Simone Moschino, and the verses beside the figures to Annibal Caro, who wrote the first in 1564, along with Bitussi and Cristoforo Madruzzo.

Then it was left alone for a century and a half. Through the nineteenth century and deep into the twentieth the garden ran wild and was neglected, which is the condition most of the surviving photographs show. Several of the carved inscriptions eroded past reading in that period.

A Surrealist brought it back. Salvador Dalí made a short film about the park in the 1950s and painted a work based on it. The attention that followed is what prompted the Bettini family to begin a restoration, which ran through the 1970s. The Temple of Eternity now holds the tombs of Giovanni Bettini and Tina Severi, the owners who did that work -- the restorers buried inside the thing they restored.

It has never been public property. The garden remains private, run today by Bosco Sacro di Bomarzo SRL and protected by the Soprintendenza.

What does the garden mean?

Nobody knows. The reason for the layout and design is largely unknown, and the proposals are proposals: Liane Lefaivre reads the figures as illustrations of the romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and it has also been suggested the garden was built as a foil to the formal symmetry of Villa Lante and the Villa Farnese nearby. The one statement of intent that survives is an inscription on the obelisks: sol per sfogare il Core, just to set the heart free.

Why is it called the Park of the Monsters?

For the sculptures -- larger than life, grotesque, and some of them cut straight out of the bedrock. It is a colloquial name; the garden's own is the Sacro Bosco, the Sacred Grove.

Can you go inside the Orcus mouth?

Yes, and it is built to be gone into. The acoustics of the chamber carry a whisper spoken inside clearly to anyone at the foot of the steps. People dined in it, which produced the effect of eating and being eaten at the same time.

Who made it?

It was commissioned by Pier Francesco "Vicino" Orsini in the sixteenth century after the death of his wife Giulia Farnese. The design is attributed to Pirro Ligorio and the sculptures to Simone Moschino.

Is it accessible?

Only partly, and the operator says so without hedging: for anyone with walking difficulties, 10% of the monumental area is visitable.

Is it state-owned?

No. It is private property, run by Bosco Sacro di Bomarzo SRL under the protection of the Soprintendenza, and was restored by the Bettini family through the 1970s after Dalí's film and painting of the 1950s brought it back to notice.