Villa Lante

Interesting facts

The garden was laid out on an existing walled hunting ground, known in Italian as a barco.

Cardinal Alessandro Peretti di Montalto, who completed the villa, was a nephew of Pope Sixtus V and only 17 when he took over at Viterbo.

The two nearly identical casini were built about 30 years apart by owners who were not related to each other.

On the Fountain of the Lamps, small jets spout from basins shaped like Roman oil lamps, so that in sunlight the water seems to flicker like flames.

A long stone table on one terrace has a channel of running water down its centre, used to keep wine cool while the cardinal entertained guests outdoors.

The central fountain of four Moors holding up the Montalto arms is traditionally attributed to the sculptor Giambologna.

The villa only took the Lante name in the 17th century, when it passed to Ippolito Lante, Duke of Bomarzo, by then already about a century old.

Water jets set into the eaves of the two small Houses of the Muses on the upper terrace could be switched on remotely, completing a so-called theatre of waters.

A perspective plan of 1609 shows woodland walks leading to obelisks and a maze, all of which have since disappeared.

In 2011 Villa Lante was voted the most beautiful park in Italy, and in 2014 it appeared on a five-euro silver coin.

Why it is worth it

Villa Lante is a garden in which water tells the story. On a hillside above the village of Bagnaia, a stream is caught at the top of the slope and led down through a sequence of terraces, each with its own fountain and its own mood: it bursts from the Fountain of the Deluge and its grottoes, trickles along a stone channel carved in the form of a crayfish, spills over a basin flanked by reclining river gods, and finally comes to rest in a broad square parterre of pools. There, in the Fontana dei Mori, four life-sized Moorish figures hold aloft the arms of the Montalto family above a pair of lions.

The garden was begun in the late 1560s for Cardinal Gianfrancesco Gambara, and its design is attributed to Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, one of the leading architects of Renaissance Rome. The Sienese engineer Tommaso Ghinucci handled the hydraulics. Instead of one large palace, the villa has two small, identical casini set side by side on the lowest terrace, so that the garden rather than the house dominates. Gambara built the first; the second was completed decades later by his successor, Cardinal Alessandro Peretti di Montalto, which is why both their emblems, the crayfish of Gambara (gambero means crayfish) and the mountains and star of Montalto, appear among the waterworks. The Gambara casino keeps its painted landscape frescoes. The estate later passed to the Lante family, whose name it still bears; it was damaged by bombing in 1944 and afterwards restored.

Bagnaia is a small village now within the municipality of Viterbo. Viterbo itself, a walled city in northern Lazio, served as the seat of the papacy for part of the thirteenth century and keeps one of the best-preserved medieval quarters in central Italy.

Getting there

Villa Lante is in Bagnaia, about 4 km from the centre of Viterbo. The nearest major airport is Rome Fiumicino (FCO), about 70 km away.

Villa Lante

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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