Across Italy’s expansive history, the distinctions between the sacred and the secular have been murky, to say the least. After all, entire cities – including the Vatican -- have been built over Roman ruins that were in turn built over the scattered archaeological puzzle pieces of Etruscan, Greek and even earlier civilizations. Nowhere is this blurred ideology more evident than in the small town of Tivoli, just outside Rome, reachable (with some effort) by bus.
Over more than one decade, I’ve been privileged to traipse across both Villa Adriana (Hadrian’s Villa), up a rural road surrounded by geese and sheep, and the aquatically orchestral Villa d’Este in the heart of Tivoli – the latter more recently restored. It’s best to begin chronologically with Hadrian’s Villa, plus it’s wiser to arrive earlier in the day when the buses are more frequent. The sprawling 300-acre former retreat of Roman Emperor (and architect) Hadrian was built between 125 and 134 AD. A world traveler, also responsible for Rome’s Pantheon and Castel Sant’Angelo (where he’s buried), Hadrian wished to linger in something of a global-fantasy world. His villa once included more than 30 buildings modeled after Greek and Egyptian monuments. It mirrored the usual ancient Roman blueprint: palaces, baths, temples, and a theater – most notably the Teatro Marittimo, an intricate (excuse the alliteration) colonnaded complex of concentric circles.
But, unlike the better preserved structures of Pompeii or Sicily’s Piazza Armerina, Hadrian’s Villa is a mere shell of its former self. Over the centuries, barbarians, church officials and then entrepreneurs looting its treasures to sell to Grand Tour enthusiasts contributed to a steady stripping of its past glory. I recall cutting across a dandelion-smothered field, against deep-green shrubs and Aleppo pines, and nearly slipping on a chipped mosaic tile – most likely from one of Hadrian’s lavishly outfitted chambers. And that’s the beauty of this particular ruin. It allows visitors to feel like archaeologists forced to fill in the blanks of hollowed-out travertine arches and denuded columns. Caryatids, the decorative classical statues used as support beams for buildings, now stand with flat pedestals atop their elegantly braided hair holding up the air. A smattering of grottos, incomplete archways, and corners of temples with only their ribbed pilasters in tact encourage modern-day explorers to imagine in their mind’s eye this once-decadent micro-metropolis.
Nevertheless, though most of the original statues and mosaics were stolen or moved to museums around the world (including Rome’s Vatican and Capitoline Museums and Paris’ Louvre), one area astounds for its statuary magnificence. The outdoor Egyptian Canopus is a combined shrine and reflecting pool of yellow-green water surrounded by copies of the draped female caryatids of Athens’ Acropolis and a stone alligator, a nod to Egypt. Hadrian was partial to both Greece and Egypt. The pool is crowned by a muscular helmeted male statue, whose naked backside greets visitors. Typically, tourists can be found giggling and snapping photos of themselves rubbing the statue’s ample buns.
In terms of important archaeological finds, Hadrian’s Villa yielded various statues of and sanctuaries to Antinous, Hadrian’s young Greek male lover who drowned in the Nile during one of the emperor’s many travels. The grief-stricken Hadrian went on to deify (literally) Antinous on the level of Adonis. Temples were built to the handsome youth, his face appeared on Roman coins, and cities were named for him. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this villa once celebrated in marble and travertine Hadrian’s greatest passions: art, architecture, travel and Antinous.
Tivoli’s late-Renaissance Villa d’Este exists in something of a parallel universe, especially considering that Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este – son of Lucrezia Borgia, by the way – dismantled huge portions of Hadrian Villa’s marble to construct it. In fact, the papal regimes always managed to find a way to erect their own pleasure palaces on re-purposed Roman foundations and decorate them with excavated Roman treasures. Hence, the precarious dance between the sacred and the profane continues. It’s also important to note that Cardinal d’Este, whose papal ambitions never came to fruition, arrived in Tivoli as a governor – a cushy sort of exile in which he even destroyed a Benedictine monastery to create his own fountain-bedecked playground.
The villa, with its brilliant allegorical ceiling frescoes, and its endless manicured gardens and waterfalls, forever makes me imagine illicit trysts and political maneuvering among the hedges and giocchi d’acqua. The famous Mannerist architect Pirro Longorio (who designed Bomarzo’s eccentric Parco dei Mostri) – and his substantial team of specialists -- was responsible for the landscape design and hydraulic engineering, all meant to be nothing short of spectacular…a veritable aquatic garden of earthly delights.
Construction took place between 1550 and 1572. Longorio’s most groundbreaking contribution is the Oval Fountain, a curvaceous waterfall under which visitors can stand and, from a slight distance, one that resembles the bottom half of an Elizabethan lady’s hoop skirt topped by a hovering bust of Venus. Arching streams spout from a grassy terraced wall, which I find to be an ideal spot for a picnic lunch. The rest is a long, leisurely stroll among dramatic geysers and mischievous gods. One fountain of a sphinx shamelessly shoots water from her double-d-cup breasts.
In the late 17th century, the cinematic Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini contributed to the Villa’s jocular artistic spritzing. Then throughout the 18th century, with the d’Este line absorbed into the Habsburg geneology and priorities shifting, its clever, eye-popping water park gradually became neglected. But, only a century later, renovations began anew. In 1879, Franz Liszt performed here and, subsequently, via ownership by the Italian government, it reopened as an amusing respite from the chaotic pace of Rome.
Yet, most strikingly, both the Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este symbolize the stripping of one empire for the glory of a new one…and so on…until they inevitably merged under the umbrella-pine dynasty of tourism.
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