The gardens of Villa d'Este at Tivoli: water, myth and allegory
Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este and Pirro Ligorio created at Tivoli a water garden full of myths: Hercules, the Fountain of the Organ, the Rometta.
At Tivoli, a little over thirty kilometres from Rome, the slope below an ancient Benedictine convent was transformed in the sixteenth century into one of the most spectacular gardens in Europe. Hundreds of jets, cascades, fishponds and fountains enliven terraces linked by stairs and avenues. But Villa d'Este is not only a triumph of hydraulic engineering: it is also a mythological narrative spread across the hillside, which visitors of the time knew how to read like a text.
The cardinal and his architect
The patron was Ippolito II d'Este, son of Alfonso I Duke of Ferrara and of Lucrezia Borgia, an immensely rich and ambitious cardinal, several times a candidate for the papacy. Appointed governor of Tivoli in 1550, he decided to transform the residence attached to the convent of Santa Maria Maggiore. The design was entrusted to the Neapolitan architect and antiquarian Pirro Ligorio, a profound connoisseur of antiquity and in particular of nearby Hadrian's Villa, from which marbles and statues were taken. The main works were concentrated in the 1560s.
Hercules and the choice between vice and virtue
The Este family boasted of descending from Hercules, and the demigod is the hidden protagonist of the garden. The main path, which climbs from below towards the palace, has been interpreted by historians as a representation of Hercules at the crossroads, the myth in which the hero must choose between the easy road of pleasure and the arduous road of virtue. The grottoes of Venus and of Diana, at the sides of the garden, embodied sensual love and chastity respectively.
The cardinal's very name evoked another myth: Hippolytus was the young Greek hero devoted to Artemis, the Diana of the Romans, famed for his chastity and for his tragic end as told by Euripides. The artists in the cardinal's service played on this namesake, interweaving the glorification of the family with moral themes. The garden thus became an allegorical portrait of its master, virtuous as Hercules and chaste as Hippolytus.
The fountains as a theatre of the world
The Oval Fountain depicts the waters of the Tiburtine hills flowing down towards the plain; at the opposite end, the Rometta reproduces the city of Rome in miniature, with the Tiber and the Tiber Island. Between the two runs the avenue of the Hundred Fountains, which symbolically represents the watercourses that carry water from the Apennines to Rome. The garden thus becomes an allegorical geography of the territory.
The Fountain of the Organ, built from 1566 by the French fountain makers Luc Leclerc and Claude Venard, contained a hydraulic organ that played by means of the pressure of water and air. It was a technical marvel inspired by the ancient treatises of Hero of Alexandria, which had described automata and instruments driven by water. The Fountain of the Dragons was instead made for the visit of Pope Gregory XIII in 1572, whose coat of arms bears precisely a dragon.
Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001, Villa d'Este fascinated travellers and artists for centuries. Franz Liszt stayed there for long periods and dedicated to it the piano piece Les jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este. Listening to it after a visit helps one understand that the garden was conceived for all the senses, and that myth flowed through it together with the water.