The Sacred Wood of Bomarzo: Vicino Orsini's park of monsters
Ogres, dragons, sphinxes and a leaning house: history and symbols of the Sacred Wood of Bomarzo, the enigmatic garden created by Vicino Orsini.
In a wooded valley below the village of Bomarzo, in the Tuscia area near Viterbo, stone giants wrestle with each other, a dragon faces the dogs, an elephant lifts a soldier with its trunk. These are not statues brought from afar: they were carved directly into the boulders of peperino stone that emerged from the ground. This is the Sacred Wood, the garden that Pier Francesco Orsini, known as Vicino, had made in the second half of the sixteenth century.
A soldier prince and man of letters
Vicino Orsini, born in 1523, fought in the wars of his time and also knew imprisonment. He was a cultivated man, in contact with writers and cardinals, and loved chivalric poetry. Work on the wood began around 1552. The garden was later bound to the memory of his wife Giulia Farnese, who died around 1560, to whom the small temple dominating one of the clearings is dedicated. The architect's name is not documented with certainty: that of Pirro Ligorio has sometimes been suggested, but the attribution remains a hypothesis.
The figures of the wood
The most famous monument is the Ogre, a gigantic face with a gaping mouth that holds a small room with a stone table. Along the upper lip runs the inscription «Ogni pensiero vola», every thought flies, perhaps a play on the echo bouncing inside the cavity. Not far away stands the leaning house, deliberately built askew, which disorients whoever enters. Then there are Proteus, Pegasus, the tortoise topped by a female figure, Cerberus and the sphinxes at the entrance.
The sphinxes themselves bear an inscription that seems a key to reading the place: whoever enters must ask whether so many marvels were made by deceit or rather by art. Other inscriptions, now partly worn away, are scattered among the statues and benches, and invite the visitor to observe, to reflect and to be astonished. The wood thus speaks to the visitor in the first person, like a poetic text spread out in space, in which every clearing adds a line.
Interpretations of an enigma
Scholars have proposed many readings. Some see in the wood an initiatory path, from confusion to wisdom; others recognise episodes from Ariosto's Orlando furioso or from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the illustrated romance printed in Venice in 1499, full of allegorical gardens and mysterious ruins. Others still stress the Mannerist taste for astonishment, surprise and paradox, the opposite of the reassuring geometry of the Italian formal garden.
No interpretation exhausts the place, and perhaps that was precisely the patron's intention. The inscriptions invite the visitor to unburden the heart and to marvel, not to find a single solution. The letters of Vicino Orsini that have come down to us speak of the wood as a place of recreation and consolation, without providing an explicit programme. The mystery of Bomarzo is also the fruit of the silence of the sources.
After centuries of neglect, the Sacred Wood was rediscovered in the twentieth century and attracted artists and writers. From 1954 the Bettini family undertook its recovery and opened it to the public. Today it remains one of the most enigmatic gardens in Europe, a book of stone written in a language that everyone must translate for themselves.