Bomarzo Culture

Bomarzo's culture is dominated by a single act of grief turned into stone.

Vicino Orsini — a condottiero and a patron of the arts — was greatly devoted to his wife Giulia Farnese, and when she died he created the gardens. A small octagonal temple was added about twenty years later to honour her. That is the emotional source of a garden that most people experience as bizarre rather than mournful.

Its intent was explicit and anti-decorative: the park was intended not to please but to astonish, and like many Mannerist works its symbolism is arcane. The sculptures appear unconnected to any rational plan and strewn almost at random, sol per sfogare il Core — just to set the heart free — as one inscription on an obelisk says.

It is also literary. Enigmatic Italian verses by Annibale Caro, Bitussi and Cristoforo Madruzzo were cut into stone beside the sculptures, some of them now eroded away.

And there is a long archaeological identity underneath: a territory intensely populated by Etruscans and Romans, with a pyramid, necropoleis and rock-cut tagliate in the woods around.

The garden's modern survival is a family story too: overgrown and neglected through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, it was restored from the 1970s by the Bettini family and remains private.