Villa d'Este: The Garden That Taught Europe

The garden at Villa d'Este begins with a slope and a river. The slope is the Valle gaudente at Tivoli, in the hills east of Rome. The river is the Aniene, channelled to the garden so that every fountain, cascade, and pool runs on gravity alone. What Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este commissioned in 1550 was not decoration for his palazzo. It was an argument: that a garden could be as intellectually complete as a building, and that water could carry the argument.

At Tivoli, water does not decorate the architecture. It is the architecture.

At Tivoli, water does not decorate the architecture. It is the architecture.

Ligorio was not only an architect but an antiquarian, and the garden is a work of scholarship as much as of design. The program he designed was iconological as well as architectural: the fountains are keyed to myth and to Rome itself, the Fontana della Rometta not least, and the whole composition reads as an argument about the city's ancient glory renewed on a Tivoli hillside. Every terrace has a subject, and every subject has a source.

A cardinal's commission

Ippolito II d'Este (1509-1572), son of Alfonso I d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia, was appointed Governor of Tivoli in 1550. For the architectural and iconological program he turned to Pirro Ligorio, painter, architect, and antiquarian; the court architect Alberto Galvani executed the work. Construction began in 1550, and the villa was nearly complete when the cardinal died in 1572.

The garden descends the steep slope on a grid of orthogonal paths, animated throughout by water. Its set pieces are famous: the Viale delle Cento Fontane, the Avenue of the Hundred Fountains; the Fontana dell'Ovato, also called the Tivoli Fountain; the Fontana della Rometta, the fountain of Rome; the Fontana dei Draghi, erected for the 1572 visit of Pope Gregory XIII; and the Fontana dell'Organo, a fountain that plays music through water power.

The engineering is invisible and total. The Aniene is channelled to the garden, and everything the garden does with water it does by gravity: the cascades, the fountains, the organ. There are no pumps. The slope is the machine, and Ligorio's design is a way of letting the river perform.

Four centuries of afterlives

Gardens outlive the regimes that plant them, and Villa d'Este has been reworked by nearly every one. From 1605, Cardinal Alessandro d'Este began a new program of restoration and additions. In the 1660s and 1670s Gianlorenzo Bernini was involved in further works, and the Fontana del Bicchierone dates to 1660-61. The 18th century brought decline, and the complex passed to the House of Habsburg.

Revival came in the mid-19th century, when Cardinal Gustav Adolf von Hohenlohe obtained the villa in enfiteusi in 1851. He hosted the composer Franz Liszt there between 1867 and 1882; Liszt composed Jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este at Tivoli, a piece of music that is itself a study of the garden's water. Liszt's piece is a reminder of what the garden has always done: it gives artists something to answer to. The water at Tivoli has been drawn, painted, photographed, and set to music for four centuries, and each generation's version says as much about the generation as about the garden. After the First World War the villa became property of the Italian State. It was restored in the 1920s and 1930s and opened to the public; damage from the 1944 bombing was repaired after the Second World War.

What UNESCO saw

In 2001, at its 25th session, UNESCO inscribed Villa d'Este on the World Heritage List (reference 1025), under criteria i, ii, iii, iv, and vi. The inscribed area is 4.5 hectares, with a 7-hectare buffer zone. The buffer matters: it protects the approaches and the views, on the understanding that a garden does not end at its walls. At Tivoli the composition runs from the palazzo down the slope and out toward the town, and the inscription recognizes the whole ensemble, not a collection of fountains. The advisory evaluation calls the villa the masterpiece of Pirro Ligorio and credits it with a decisive influence on the development of European garden art. That is the formal version of the claim the garden has been making since 1550: that a landscape, designed with the seriousness of architecture, belongs to the highest register of art.

Today the villa is an Italian state museum. Since September 2016 it has been managed by the Istituto autonomo Villa Adriana e Villa d'Este, an autonomous institute of the Italian Ministry of Culture that also administers Villa Adriana and other Tivoli sites. It has been protected under national heritage legislation since 1988.

What the visitor encounters today is the composition essentially as Ligorio left it, deepened by four centuries of care and damage and repair. The terraces still descend, the fountains still run on the river's gravity, and the garden still makes the case it made in 1550: that a landscape, taken seriously, is one of the highest things architecture can do.

The slope as machine

The water at Tivoli is a feat of construction before it is a feat of design. Ligorio's first task was to secure a supply, and the record of what that took is astonishing. Work on the first aqueduct began in 1560, carrying water to a reservoir beneath the old monastery for the town and the villa alike. When that supply proved insufficient, a second aqueduct followed in 1564: a conduit more than a thousand feet long, tall enough to stand in, excavated beneath Tivoli to draw directly from the falls of the Aniene. Ligorio did not simply specify fountains. He studied the Roman aqueducts, wrote on their restoration, and then built new ones. The scholarship and the engineering were the same work.

By the time the system was complete, the garden held, in the scholar David Coffin's count, 51 fountains and grottos, 398 spouts, 364 water jets, 64 waterfalls, and 220 basins, fed by nearly 2,900 feet of canals, channels, and cascades. Every one of them ran on gravity. There were no pumps in the original design, and there never needed to be: the head of water the slope provides is the pressure, and the slope is what makes the performance possible. Walk down the central axis and you are walking down through the pressure gradient, each terrace a register of what the river can be made to say.

No pumps. Only gravity, a slope, and a scholar who knew how Rome built aqueducts.

Two fountains show what gravity could do that ornament alone could not. The Fontana dell'Organo turns falling water into music: the air, agitated by water dropping into a vaulted chamber, is driven through the pipes of an organ, so that the fountain plays like an instrument. Montaigne visited the garden in 1580 and described the water's music as true music, naturally made. Nearby, the Fountain of the Owl used a series of bronze pipes like flutes to make the sound of birds. The garden does not merely show water. It makes water speak, sing, and mimic the living world.

Rome in miniature

The iconological program is the garden's other engineering, and it is as deliberate as the hydraulics. The main axis is not quite perpendicular to the palazzo; it is set a fraction off, aligned instead on the temple of the Tiburtine Sibyl that stands above the falls of the Aniene, folding the sacred geography of Tivoli into the composition. Nothing at Tivoli is placed for convenience. Everything is placed for meaning.

At the center of the program stands the Rometta, the fountain of Rome: a miniature of the ancient city, decorated with models of its famous landmarks. The Viale delle Cento Fontane, which runs across the hillside to connect the Fontana dell'Ovato with the Rometta, was lined with three tiers of fountains bearing sculptures of episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, some three hundred spouts feeding three parallel canals; the upper spouts bore fleurs-de-lis, eagles, obelisks, and ships drawn from the d'Este coat of arms, the family writing its name in water. The Fontana dei Draghi, erected for the 1572 visit of Pope Gregory XIII, takes one of the Labors of Hercules as its subject. Hercules was held to be the legendary ancestor of the house of Este, and the garden's grottos of Aesclepius and Diana told the myth of Ippolito, the cardinal's own mythic namesake. Read terrace by terrace, the garden argues that the glory of ancient Rome has been renewed in the house of Este.

The model for Europe

From 1550, the garden at Tivoli did something no garden had done at this scale: it treated water as the primary building material of a landscape and mythology as its plan. The UNESCO advisory evaluation, which calls Villa d'Este the masterpiece of Pirro Ligorio, credits it with a decisive influence on the development of European garden art, and the formal language bears the claim out. The terraced water garden, the cascade as architecture, the fountain as a bearer of meaning: these are Ligorio's inventions at Tivoli, and they traveled.

The gardens that followed, from the Renaissance villas of Latium to the great waterworks of the Baroque, work in a grammar that Tivoli wrote down. It remains the reference against which ambitious water gardens are measured, four and a half centuries on: not because it is old, but because it solved the problem so completely. A garden could be intellectually complete, and water could carry the argument. Tivoli proved it, and Europe took notes.