Bagnaia, Bomarzo i Tuscania

Bagnaia, Bomarzo i Tuscania

Not counting Rome, Viterbo is by far the best base for trips around northern Lazio, especially to places, which are difficult to visit during day trips from the capital. The mannerist villas of Caprarola and Bagnaia are nearby and easily accessible by public transport, as well as the equally ancient bizarre Bomarzo Gardens by Lake Bolsena. There is also a bus from Viterbo to Tuscania, boring resort of a very boring area.

Bagnaia

Located at approx. 5 km east of Viterbo BAGNAIA is not a very big city. As in Caprarola further south, It is completely dominated by the 16th-century palace, Villa Lante, which slight, but the magnificent gardens are considered a masterpiece of Vignola and one of the most outstanding examples of Renaissance gardening art "the most wonderful example of the physical beauty of nature in all of Italy and the world.", according to Sachaverell Sitwell.

Traveling directly from Rome is quite tedious (3 hours by Roma-Nord line), but from Viterbo there are buses every hour, as well as the less frequent trains of the Roma-Nord line.

In fact, the Villa consists of two villas, built for a pair of cardinals at an interval of twenty years, but constituting symmetrically opposing parts of the same design. The buildings are open only on big holidays and don't present anything special. Unlike Caprarola, the pride of the city is its gardens, one of the best-preserved from that period and constituting a summary of mannerist aspirations. The basic complex of gardens is located behind the villas on five slightly sloping terraces and can only be visited if accompanied by a guide (wt.-nd. 9.00-12.00; 2000 L). This ambitious project, even for those times, is an attempt at a stylized interpretation of the natural world and illustrates the course of the river from the source on the hill to the mouth of the sea., the role of the great ground floor here. Along the way, the river has various water adventures; waterfalls, lakes and the like, and among the numerous fountains and low hedges there are many humorous accents, for example the cascade in the shape of an elongated crayfish and the so-called "wet sloths."”, hidden fountains sprinkling god of spirit into guilty guests. It was the favorite pastime of mannerist jokers, and currently only the guide has the right to run them.

Neighboring park, which can be visited individually, presents an even more ambitious story with the help of garden art, namely, the development of civilization from primitive times to the glorious sixteenth century. As usual in mannerism, both in the assumptions and decoration of the park, as well as the villa, allegory plays an almost equal role, what architecture; for example, various rectangular motifs on buildings were meant to signify heavenly perfection brought down to earth.

Bomarzo

0 12 km northeast of Bagnaia is the town of BOMARZO with another mannerist creation, Park of the Monsters (codz. from dawn to dusk; 6500 L, students 4000 L). It would be hard to find a greater contrast to the sluggish elegance of the previous gardens. Theoretically, it is still a garden, but one look at the tangle of trees and giants is enough, completely crazy sculptures, to visualize, to what perversions mannerism has come to be. Salvador Dali loved the surreal atmosphere of this place, and even made a movie here. Unearthly elements, like a 16th-century Jordanian garden with creatures from the world of fantasy and horror, made the garden one of the main tourist attractions in northern Lazio.

Built in 1552 r. by the humpbacked prince Orsini Sacro Boso, or "Holy Forest", by his willful vulgarity, he was supposed to be a parody of self-admiring mannerism. He mocked the intellectual claims of the era, mocking idealized Arcadian retreats, where you protected yourself from society, and the alleged "triumph” art over nature. However, he himself displayed a mannerist tendency to be showy. The garden was said to have been built by Turkish prisoners taken prisoner at the Battle of Lepanto (though this seems only a dubious Christian justification for "heretical” features of the garden), you can also find Etruscan influences in the form of numerous urns and pine cones, and the craziest passages were allegedly inspired by the epic poem Orlando Furioso Ariosta, popular at the time, a story about losing your mind. A statue of a great fighter at the entrance, tearing apart woodcutter, it was borrowed from this story and symbolizes the madness of Ariosta, while a sculpture of an English prince set up further in the park, pouring Ariostus's brain into the elephant's trunk, is meant to symbolize regaining your senses.

Others wet, the mossy figures represent turtles, elephants, Moby Dick, mask with a crazy smile, dragons, nymphs, butterflies and many different things, which cannot be named. There is also a Doric temple here, which consciously contradicts all classical conventions. legend says, that the prince's wife fell dead to the ground after one glance at the building.

Only four buses a day run from Viterbo to Bomarzo, where the arrows indicate, it only takes a walk to Parco dei Mostri 10 minutes. You can also get there by train, the nearest station is Attigliano-Bomarzo on the Orte-Montefiascone-Viterbo line, but you have to walk to the park 5 km.

Tuscania

The monotony of this wide one, the lonely land between Viterbo and Tarquinia is enormously diversified by herds of sheep. Not counting TUSCANIA, of course, strange city open plan, distinguished by a long stretch of medieval walls and several well-preserved towers. A cypress alley leads to it. For the most part, the Renaissance center is attractive and hardly visited, and the whole city has a kind of charm. The main purpose of the visit are two deservedly famous Romanesque churches located on the eastern edge of the city, near the erratic rocks of the former Etruscan settlement.

From central Piazza Basile, follow Via Clodia, until the characteristic shape of the Church of San PiÄ™tro emerges. This structure is considered to be one of the jewels of Italian Romanism and was built in the 13th century. Later fragments come from the 18th century. from Lombardy. There is a well-worn grassy square in front of the building, which could pass for the courtyard, on the sides there are two sturdy towers, remnant of the Bishop's Palace. The entire church was once fortified as part of the city's defense system. Marble facade ornaments, the most impressive of which are a group of a dancer and a man choked by a snake, probably come from an Etruscan temple. The interior is solemn and spacious, with giants, bare pillars supporting bizarre stepped arches, which in Italy are called dentati (literally "toothed”). There are frescoes from the beginning of the 12th century in the transept., which did not contribute to the earthquake in 1971 r.

Another important point in the urban landscape, is the church of Santa Maria Maggiore located a stone's throw down the hill. It is less graceful than San Pietro, although it consciously imitates some of its elements and was built in the same period. The marble porch is an exact copy of the entrance to San Pietro, probably made by Pisz sculptors in the 12th century.; the rest of the ruddy brick facade is basically gothic and only the left portal retains the zigzag Norman ornamental motif. The interior is characterized by the typical austere simplicity of the Romanesque style: stone walls, here and there a fresco and finally a baptismal font intended for the total immersion of a baptized child The rest of the city is definitely less impressive and boasts only the archaeological museum located in the cloisters of Santa Maria di Rosa on via XX Settembre. Not counting the typical exhibition of Etruscan monuments, there are also collections of ceramics from the 12th to 17th centuries., many fragments come from the walls of local houses.

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