Discover Villa d'Este

Villa d'Este is a sixteenth-century villa in Tivoli, east of Rome, and the garden rather than the house is the reason to come. A steep hillside has been cut into terraces and given over almost entirely to moving water, in an arrangement that became one of the most copied garden designs in Europe. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list in 2001. It is run today as an Italian state museum.

The garden is the work, and it is built on a slope. Terraces descend the hillside one below another, linked by stairs and ramps and planted around a sequence of fountains, basins and water features that are fed by gravity alone. The ingenuity of the hydraulics -- fountains, ornamental pools, water-driven effects -- is what made the place famous, and what later landscape designers across Europe came to study.

The site was chosen for its water and its view, and was too small for everything else. The governor's residence was a ninth-century Benedictine convent, built over an older Roman villa and given to the Franciscans in 1256. It was far too cramped for the household of a cardinal as prominent as Ippolito d'Este, but it looked out over the countryside towards Hadrian's Villa and it had water in quantity. He commissioned Pirro Ligorio, who had excavated Hadrian's Villa and the Roman sites around it, to design something that would beat what the Romans had built -- and took the marble and statuary for it out of Hadrian's Villa itself.

The slope was the engineering problem, and moving earth was the answer. Construction was planned for the end of 1550 but the cardinal was away on diplomatic missions, then exiled in 1555 on a charge of simony by Pope Paul IV; work began only in July 1560, after Pius IV restored him. Between 1563 and 1565 an enormous quantity of earth was dug out to build the terraces, arcades, grottoes, niches and nymphaeums. The Aniene was diverted to feed the pools, jets, channels, fountains and cascades. Canals were cut and 200 metres of pipe buried to carry water from the artificial mountain under the Oval Fountain to the rest of the garden. The villa itself went up under the Ferrarese architect-engineer Alberto Galvani, the Este court architect.

It was built over houses, and the town sued. More land was acquired through 1569 and the site swallowed houses, public buildings and roads. In 1568 local residents brought twelve separate lawsuits against the cardinal. None of them stopped the work.

The decoration outlasted the money. Interior work began in 1565-66 under Livio Agresti, then Girolamo Muziano and Federico Zuccari, with teams of painters and stucco workers through to 1572 and sculptors including Giovan Battista della Porta and Gillis van den Vliete. Ligorio came back in 1567-68 to finish the fountains. Work slowed from 1569 as the cardinal's finances failed. For Gregory XIII's visit in the summer of 1572 he redecorated the top floors and rushed the dragon fountain through; the reception cost more than five thousand scudi and he pawned his silver to pay for it. He died that December.

Then it was stripped, over a century and a half. His nephew Luigi struggled with the upkeep; after 1586 the Cardinal Deacons of the Sacred College did little. Alessandro d'Este overhauled the gardens and water system from 1599 and added fountains to the lower garden, Francesco I restored crumbling structures and planted the first trees in what had been an unshaded garden, and Rinaldo I commissioned two fountains from Bernini in 1660-61. After 1695 the Este could no longer afford a villa they rarely used and which earned nothing. The furnishings went to Modena after 1751 and the antique sculpture was sold off piece by piece. The Habsburgs took possession in 1796; French soldiers occupied it twice and removed much of what was left.

What a visitor sees is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century rescue. Cardinal Gustav von Hohenlohe, owner between 1850 and 1896, restored the ruined villa and the overgrown gardens, which by then suited romantic taste exactly. The Italian State acquired it after the First World War and began a major restoration in 1922, refurnishing the rooms with paintings from the storerooms of the Galleria Nazionale in Rome. The Hundred Fountains, restored in the seventeenth century and then abandoned, were restored again in 1930 to their present form; the Fountain of the Tripod has only stood on the Vialone since 1930 and is a copy, the original being in the Louvre. Bombing in 1944 destroyed most of the painted vault in the entrance foyer, where only fragments including The Sacrifice of Isaac survive, and postwar air pollution degraded many of the walls.

Much of what you are looking at is an absence. The Leda fountain's original group was sold in the eighteenth century and is in the Galleria Borghese; a headless Minerva found in a Tivoli garden stands there now. Aesculapius from the Grotto of Aegle is in the Louvre and Aegle herself in the Vatican; Pandora and a Minerva from the Loggia of Pandora are in the Capitoline. The Hercules that stood at the Loggetta, one of three aligned down the central axis so all were visible together from the bottom of the garden, is in the Louvre. Europa Embracing the Bull, from the empty central niche of the Fountain of Europa, is at the Villa Albani in Rome, and the Fountain of the Sea Horses that Ippolito moved here from Hadrian's Villa is in the Vatican Museum.

How long does the villa and garden take?

The garden is the larger half and it is all on a slope. Plan on the descent to the fishponds, the cross-walks on each level and the climb back, plus the rooms at the top.

Do the fountains actually work?

Yes, and entirely by gravity -- 51 fountains, 398 spouts, 364 jets, 64 waterfalls and 220 basins, with no pumps in the system. The water organ, silent for many years, was restored and plays again for visitors.

Is it step-free?

No. The garden drops more than 45 metres and is crossed by ramps and repeated double flights of stairs, with no route around them. The Cardinal's Walk runs level across one terrace, but reaching it and leaving it both involve stairs.

Where did all the statues go?

Sold or removed, mostly in the eighteenth century, and mostly to museums that still hold them: the Louvre has Aesculapius, the Hercules from the Loggetta and the original of the Tripod fountain; the Vatican has Aegle, the Hercules in repose and the Sea Horses fountain; the Capitoline has Pandora, a Minerva and the Grotto of Diana group; the Galleria Borghese has the Leda group. The empty niche in the Fountain of Europa held a Europa Embracing the Bull now at the Villa Albani.

Is it a UNESCO site?

Yes, inscribed in 2001.

How does it relate to Hadrian's Villa?

Directly, and not only by proximity. Being made Governor of Tivoli in 1549 gave Ippolito d'Este jurisdiction over the site, and he took marble and statuary from it for this garden. Hadrian's Villa is visible from the salon and from the Vialone terrace.