Discover the Mysteries of Italy’s Park of Monsters, a 16th-Century Garden Filled With Strange, Colossal Stone Creatures

Pelican Press · October 25

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Discover the Mysteries of Italy’s Park of Monsters, a 16th-Century Garden Filled With Strange, Colossal Stone Creatures

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Lanta Davis and Vince Reighard

Visiting the

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(Italian for Sacred Grove), a 16th-century garden in Bomarzo, Italy, is no ordinary walk through the park. The seven-acre site’s sculpted monsters, open tombs and dramatic depictions of supernatural combatants make the experience more akin to braving a Renaissance version of a haunted house. Visitors can wander through a tilted building, run away from a giant gaping mouth and—if they manage to get past Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the gates of the underworld—descend into *****.

The Sacro Bosco’s colossal stone statues are frightening to behold. But what makes this garden extra eerie is that no one knows for sure why monsters haunt these woods. “No receipts, account books or commission documents survive to tell us about the Sacro Bosco’s creation,” says

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, an art historian at Clark University and the co-author of an upcoming book about the garden.

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, the duke who commissioned the Sacro Bosco in the mid-1500s, left no explicit clues.

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A statue of a Greek sea **** named Glaucus

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A statue of Cerberus, the three-headed guard of the gates of the underworld

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Commonly called the

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, the Sacro Bosco doesn’t exactly fit in with other historical

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. These spaces “were usually rationally designed, with specific paths to follow and one theme that brings everything together,” says

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, an architectural historian and curator of rare books at

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in Washington, D.C. Consider, for instance, the Italian gardens at

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in Tivoli, which tell the story of the mythological hero Hercules, or the aquatic-inspired features at

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in Bagnaia. At the Sacro Bosco, however, Tchikine argues that no single narrative provides a satisfying explanation; similarly, the park’s labyrinthine pathways offer no specific itinerary for visitors to follow.

“Most Renaissance gardens are a safe respite in nature,” Garton says. But the Sacro Bosco is a “rambling woods filled with surprises, frightful beasts and ancient ruins.” A visitor is never quite sure what is lurking around the corner. Not all of the Sacro Bosco’s sculptures terrify, but “some features in the garden are meant to haunt the visitor’s memory,” Garton adds.

Part of what haunts visitors and scholars alike is the mystery behind the monsters. Statues of sphinxes at the entrance of the garden seem to challenge visitors to solve the riddle of its meaning, with cryptic inscriptions throughout the site offering hints to those who attempt to figure out what a perilously leaning house; a half-viper, half-woman creature; an elephant carrying a fallen soldier with its trunk; and the Roman sea **** Neptune have in common.

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A statue of Neptune, the Roman **** of freshwater and the sea

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Echidna, a half-woman, half-snake monster from Greek mythology (left), and a pair of lions (right)

Courtesy of the Sacro Bosco

Theories abound: Perhaps Orsini created the garden as a tribute to his late wife. Maybe he wanted to present an

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informed by classical literature and art. But no one knows for certain what the sculptures really mean. The Park of Monsters’ riddles remain unsolved.

The key to unlocking the code may lie in learning more about the man who created the monsters: Orsini, a duke of Bomarzo who was known by the nickname Vicino. The eerie, frightening atmosphere of the Sacro Bosco led some modern visitors to question whether Orsini commissioned the monstrous sculptures because he was a monster himself. After visiting the Sacro Bosco, Argentine writer

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wrote a 1962 novel,

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, that depicts Orsini as a morally corrupt madman with a hunched back, who plotted vengeance against his wife and brother-in-law after discovering they’d had an affair. Mujica Láinez’s story was entirely imagined, but it was so convincing that

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. The novel was also adapted into an

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. Both works of fiction

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how people in the 20th century viewed Orsini and his stone monsters.

The historical record doesn’t support the characterization of the duke as a vindictive monster. But his garden might very well have been an external expression of his internal, invisible demons. These “monsters” were not madness, but rather grief and loss. Orsini was a well-connected, powerful nobleman, but his life was not one of leisure and happiness. Born in 1523, he inherited both the dukedom and the Bomarzo estate in 1542, shortly before he married Giulia Farnese, a relative of Pope Paul III. In the early 1550s, Orsini left home to ****** in a war against France, but he was captured and held as a prisoner of war. Giulia ***** not long after her husband returned to Bomarzo.

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A statue of a sphinx

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Though parts of the Sacro Bosco were built before Giulia’s ******, the majority of the garden, especially its more monstrous and grotesque features, was created after she *****, leading some to speculate that the project was an expression of the duke’s grief. “There was little doubt,” Tchikine says, that “Orsini was quite traumatized when his wife *****.”

After Giulia’s ******, Orsini commissioned a large mausoleum for her. Near to it are several sculptures related to the underworld, including Persephone, the queen of the *****, whose lap acts as a bench, and Cerberus. In a 1570 letter, Orsini

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that he “received every sort of consolation by having the Sacro Bosco in place of [his] dearest beloved.” One of the park’s inscriptions simply reads, “Just to relieve the heart.” It is possible, Tchikine says, to read the garden as a kind of “therapy for [Orsini], something that he was constructing from the grief he experienced.”

At the same time, some of the sculptures convey a sense of wit and playfulness that doesn’t easily tie into the grief narrative.

The Sacro Bosco’s most famous sculpture, the so-called

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, swallows visitors whole with its enormous open mouth. It could be interpreted as a symbol of the all-consuming nature of grief. But the sculpture also acts as a place of entertainment. Orsini reportedly held dinner parties inside the artwork: “[Its] mouth makes the door, and the windows are the eyes; and inside the ******* is used as the table, and the teeth as the seats,” a 16th-century visitor to the garden recounted. “And when one lays dinner with candles lit among the drinks, from a distance it appears as the most frightful visage.” Several other statues, especially depictions of animals like turtles and dolphins, don’t make immediate sense as memorials to the *****.

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The so-called Mouth of ***** is the Sacro Bosco’s most famous sculpture.

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Elephants, dolphins and turtles are among the animals depicted at the Sacro Bosco.

Lanta Davis

Some scholars suggest looking to

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rather than his life. Renaissance art drew heavily on ancient Roman sources,

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Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Orsini was well educated, and the stories referenced in his garden reflect the texts he read. The garden’s sculptures abound with possible literary references, from Ovid and Petrarch to later Italian poets like Dante Alighieri and Ludovico Ariosto. When visitors walk past Cerberus to descend the stairs into ******’s domain, says Tchikine, they imitate

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’ journey to rescue his wife from the underworld. But not every sculpture has an obvious literary source, and once again, the garden’s menagerie of monsters defies logic.

The key to the riddle could also rest not in Orsini, but in the landscape itself. Tchikine describes an “aura of mystery” present in both the Sacro Bosco and the surrounding area of

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. The Italian town’s secluded, dark trees and large boulders give rise to a “strange, uncanny feeling” reinforced by the haunted quality of the centuries-old ruins scattered throughout the landscape, he says.

The Etruscans, a pre-Roman group who resided in the area in the first millennium B.C.E., left behind tombs, a

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and miscellaneous structures. As with the Sacro Bosco itself, practically “no sources and very little history” about Bomarzo’s ancient past survives today, Tchikine says. Given that the area has been populated for more than 2,000 years, he adds, this historical gap further enhances the Sacro Bosco’s “general sense of mystery.”

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An Etruscan-style bench

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Orsini seemingly drew inspiration from the history of his home, borrowing techniques from Etruscan tombs, including creating the sculptures out of

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(meaning

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carved in situ), just as the ancient civilization did. The Sacro Bosco boasts Etruscan-style

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and other architectural elements associated with the pre-Roman culture.

The Sacro Bosco’s strange shapes might even be as simple as Orsini replicating what was already present in the natural environment. He could have noticed stones that reminded him of living creatures, as one might spot a cloud that looks like a dog. Perhaps Orsini saw a boulder that resembled an elephant or a dragon, and then he recruited a carver to help coax that image out of the rock. If so, Orsini’s process was similar to that of the Renaissance’s greatest sculptor, Michelangelo, who described his work as

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trapped within the stone. Maybe Orsini was simply freeing the monsters and mythical beasts he saw stuck inside of his garden.

After Orsini’s ****** in the mid-1580s, the Sacro Bosco almost *****, too. Falling into obscurity for centuries, the garden was only “

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” in the years after World War II, when

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like Italian critic Mario Praz, Spanish Surrealist

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and French poet Jean Cocteau publicized it in their creative works. Abandoned in the woods, the site’s monsters seemed to emerge from the earth itself. Eyes peered out from behind the trees, and visitors soon spotted sculpted wildlife such as elephants, dragons and giant turtles.

Salvador Dalí in visita al parco di Bomarzo

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Since the origin of these monsters had been all but forgotten, observers’ imaginations ran wild. Some guests were captivated by the dark, twisting forces they saw at work in the garden, whose mysterious and often grotesque sculptures seemed to tap into their subconscious fears and desires. As word of its stone monsters spread, the Sacro Bosco rose out of its hiding place in the woods.

Today, the garden continues to

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upon those who wander onto its grounds. That the site resists a simple, comprehensive explanation seems to be precisely its point. Whether scholars ever puzzle out the meaning of the monsters, one fact is certain: The Sacro Bosco, in the words of one of Orsini’s inscriptions, “resembles only itself and nothing else.”

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The Three Graces in a nymphaeum

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#Discover #Mysteries #Italys #Park #Monsters #16thCentury #Garden #Filled #Strange #Colossal #Stone #Creatures

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