Villa d'Este

Villa d'Este is less a palace with a garden than a machine for turning a river into theatre. Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, son of the Duke of Ferrara and a grandson of Lucrezia Borgia, commissioned it in 1560, and the antiquarian Pirro Ligorio devised its programme of myth and allegory while the engineer Alberto Galvani built it. The work ran until the cardinal's death in 1572. The rooms of the villa, frescoed in those same years, are handsome, but they serve mainly as a balcony: the real composition begins when you step onto the terrace and look down the slope below.

The garden falls away in terraces cut into the hillside of Tivoli, and every one of them is organised around water. A branch of the Aniene was diverted to feed it, and the whole system still runs on gravity alone, with no pumps. The numbers are almost comic in their excess: some fifty fountains and nymphaea, hundreds of spouts and jets, dozens of cascades and more than two hundred basins. The Avenue of the Hundred Fountains is the moment most people remember, three stacked channels running along a path with close to three hundred small spouts, moss and ferns thickening over the carved masks. At one end sits the Oval Fountain, designed by Ligorio himself and finished in 1570; at the other the Rometta, a miniature ancient Rome built as a fountain.

Further down, the ingenuity turns to sound. The Fountain of the Organ, installed in 1571, used falling water to force air through pipes and play music on its own; it was restored in 2003 and plays again. The Fountain of the Owl was a musical automaton in which bronze birds were made to sing by water. Below the organ, the long cascade and pools of the Fountain of Neptune are a twentieth-century addition that fits the original so well that few would guess. Walk the cross-axes slowly: the design is built on views along avenues, and the sound of water changes from roar to trickle as you move between them.

In the nineteenth century the villa and its gardens had deteriorated badly, and it was Cardinal Gustav von Hohenlohe who restored them in the second half of the nineteenth century. His guest Franz Liszt stayed here repeatedly between 1865 and 1885 and wrote three piano pieces inspired by the place. The Italian state acquired the villa after the First World War and began a long restoration in 1922; bomb damage in 1944 was repaired after the Second World War. Since 2001 Villa d'Este has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Getting there

The villa is in the centre of Tivoli, a hill town in the countryside east of Rome, about 0.6 km from the town's heart. The nearest airport is Rome Ciampino (CIA), about 25 km away. From Rome, Cotral regional buses run from the Ponte Mammolo metro station; get off at Largo Nazioni Unite, about 100 m from the entrance. Alternatively, take the FL2 regional train from Roma Tiburtina to Tivoli station and a short local bus ride to Piazza Garibaldi.