ROME GARDENS

Rome is Europe’s most verdant capital city.  Continuously lived in for 2500 years, this vital city has preserved and protected its green spaces through war, famine, pestilence, and the political upheavals that traveled this crossroad of history.  Even today, these nature resources are important --- providing a wildlife corridor for migrations from the North Pole to Africa, as well as helping Italy meet the emission targets of the Kyoto Protocol.

Despite the number of gardens and green spaces in the city, many who live or visit don’t notice these quiet corners.  Rome’s cultivations are often found behind high walls, which were intended to exclude centuries of passersby who, nevertheless, share the benefit of these precious spaces over the years. 

Fortunately, many of Rome’s historic gardens are now public, though they may be difficult to locate.  Others require an invitation to enter, though they may be on cultural itineraries that the city annually sponsors.   All have a story, and contribute in some way to the long history of Rome, and so living culture as well as beautiful areas of the city to visit.

HISTORY OF ITALIAN GARDENS

Until the fall of the Roman Empire,  the green spaces in and around Rome were tended as either wild hunting woods (boschi) or vegetable patches (orti semplici). 

Food production has always been important on the Apennine Peninsula.  Today, orti semplici are tended throughout Rome, either in community gardens or on private balconies and terraces, or squatting on sunny corners along rail right-of-ways.  The ancient boschi, too, are preserved as city parks, nature reserves, or private groves.  They are no longer used to hunt for anything but the mushrooms, asparagus and forest greens which are woven into the famous Italian seasonal cuisine.  However some of the names, Sacred Beech, Sacred Woods suggest the legendary spirits they once hosted.

But man can’t live by bread alone.  Though the millennia, some of these foraging and agricultural assets have undergone transformation into some of the world’s most beautiful hand-of-man landscapes.  Their microclimates, discovered thousands of years ago, now offer visitors the beauty for beauty’s sake, and the possibility to transcend the concerns and stress of our daily lives. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF ITALIAN GARDENS

In the Medieval age, when both religious and feudal communities sought survival strategies in the absence of sovereign governments and a world superpower, manors and monasteries were planted with pharmacological herbs in their most protected plots. These medicinal plants often defined boundary between life and death and the medieval orto medico was planted with curative herbs, figs, laurel and grapes in formulaic arrays.  Its planting schematics, based on therapeutic expediency, soon developed a religious symbolism. The orto medico of medieval monasteries is a beautiful and evocative space, symmetrically arranged.  No wonder Mendel did so much research in its confines.

Paradoxically, these monastic orti of the Middle Ages had much in common with the Imperial gardens of the Vestal Virgins, the community of pagan priestesses of Ancient Rome.  The Vestal villa had rooms each opening onto the interior courtyard and protected from the neighbor’s eyes. No one is quite sure what went on there!

The Vestal garden, in its turn, was on modeled on the Persian villa.  Persia, the nemesis of Ancient and Imperial Rome, was the first culture to plant a garden strictly based on beauty.  The Persian gardens, themselves a radical innovation from the Hanging Gardens of the Bible, were in the center of the villa.  Ornamentally planted and completely separated from public eye, entry to them was proscribed only for senior members of a family for quiet contemplation and divine inspiration.  This communion is rhapsodized in classical Persian poetry. In fact, Latin word for “paradise” comes from the Persian words, pairi (around) and daeza or diz (wall). 

The influence of these gardens over the millennia suggests that natural beauty, contemplation and inspiration are necessary qualities for the good life.

Medieval, Vestal and Persian gardens shared another important element:  a central fountain with waterways irrigating the private paradise.   Water as a current, connecting the natural world with the spiritual, is used in a radically different context once the Renaissance begins.

THE GRAND GARDENS

The private and humble Medieval gardens throughout Europe at the dawn of the 14th century were insufficiently grand for the secular Renaissance popes. Celebrating their return from Avignon, France, to power at the center of the world stage in Rome, the papal garden became a series of grand public outdoor rooms. The Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque gardens were designed to impress and intimidate --- and thus were public expressions of institutional and personal power.

The garden project at St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican in the 15th century was the first to redefine the construct.  Soon , this water wonderland became the model for the popes’ private and family residences throughout Italy for the next 200 years.  Instead of religious iconography, however, these popes preferred mythological and pagan symbolism, and visually linked their rule to that of the Roman Empire.

These extraordinary gardens, the outdoor extensions of the palace rooms, conquered much of the surrounding nature. The beds were planted with ornamental specimens, native and foreign, and were horticultural advertisements of the extent of the owner’s realm.

Roses, peonies, palms and cypress replaced vegetable beds in the sunny areas, while camellias, azaleas, and rhododendron softened the shaded corners. Box hedges, rather than harvested aromatics, divided the acreage, permanently defining the planting beds --- and thus began the culture of the par terre, or “giardino all’italiano”. This extension of the home into nature, involving plants, waterways and sculpture, is a hallmark of landscape architecture even today.

What we especially appreciate today is the continued abundance and flow of good water in these areas.  Economic boom periods of Etruscan, Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance and Baroque societies always meant new construction of waterways.   Many of the original hydraulic delivery and drainage systems still function today,  whether originally commissioned for simple supply, defense or ostentatious display --and however many centuries ago.

Building the waterways almost always unearthed archeological treasure which inspired the contemporary artists. Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, Borromini, Goethe, Handel, and Mozart were workers and/or guests in these beautiful spaces.  Here, they got to meet and work with master craftsmen and early material scientists Pozzi, Valadier, Moderno. Ligorio, and Vignola, among others.

Former guests to these gardens included history’s philosophers and social populists, like Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, Charlemagne, St. Francis, Dante, Galileo, and Queen Christina who might have met and exchanged information with other sovereign, spiritual, or adventure travelers, at these garden crossroads. These guests used the same roads we use today.

During Grand Tour days in the 18th century, the area’s natural landscape attracted English Pleine Aire painters, who especially appreciated the good weather.  These unhurried landscape paintings, with remarkable lateral shadows and depicting the romantic tumble of found antiquity in nature, were the areas’ first advertising banners, attracting Romantics from all the arts.  Keats, Shelly and Byron and Russell Page and Salvador Dali all have histories here, both personally and philosophically.  Many contemporary artists and artisans choose to live here today and there are Open Air painting schools, mosaic and pottery workshops, and culinary institutes throughout the countryside.

In addition to the Top 10 treasure that the world knows and loves in Rome,  there are remarkable villas, palaces, and castles in the middle of cultivated natural landscapes.  The bosco parrasio, secret gardens and grand gardens that surround and are incorporated in these medieval, Renaissance and modern structures are on crossroads where history’s movers and shakers met.  

Here lived, loved, and warred the Borgia, Orsini, Farnese, della Rovere, Sciara, Odelscalchi, Torlonia, Gambara, Albani, Medici, Borghese, Barbarini and Napoleon Bonaparte’s families. They built in Rome, and in surrounding the Tuscia and Etruria,  as the families of their craftsmen built the villages of Bomarzo, Vignanello, Vasanello, Soriano, Bagnaia, Nepi, Cività Castellana, Farfa, Bracciano, Viterbo, Caprarola, Sutri, and Porano.

And most interesting of all are the cloisters, still resonating with the cloistered spirituality of thosewho have tended them.  San Gregorio, San Pietro,  St. Francis, St. Saba, Quattro Coronati, San Lorenzo, Sant’Onofrio on the Janiculum, La Scarzuola, and .Santa Maria delle Querche are landscape models of monastic communities living around a contemplative, spiritual center.  These gardens certainly have secrets beyond the visual metaphors.

Lastly, there are the outliers which are alone in their categories -– the castle of Charlemagne, Cleopatra and Julius Caesar’s villa in the center of Rome, and the modern gardens, at Opera Bosco, Otricoli, Castel dei Fiori and Calcata, which are variations on landscape themes.  Visual and evocative, too, they tell a micro story of events that lead us to today.

These timeless treasures are worthy of a day or two of your time while in Rome.

Tour the wonderful gardens of Rome with us!