Rome Monty Don's Italian Gardens

The British have long been entranced by Italy,

its beautiful countryside,

the enduring traditions of art and culture,

and, of course, its extraordinary gardens.

I'm taking a journey throughout the whole of Italy,

visiting beautiful gardens everywhere I go.

You come and immediately you feel inspired.

I'll be in Florence, where gardens grew from the Renaissance ideals.

In every direction, you see balance, order and harmony.

And Naples, with unexpectedly intimate glimpses behind displays

of astonishing grandeur.

This is a peek at her bum, and I like the sense of what the butler saw.

I'll be looking in on the gardens of the rich and the famous.

So, what's this one here?

-Mr Clooney's place.

-Yeah, I can see why he might want to live there.

As well as meeting local Italians growing some of the best food in the world.

It's very good.

But my journey begins in Rome, the seat of emperors and popes, to visit

gardens that are amongst the most flamboyant ever created in history.

Tourists have been flocking to Rome for hundreds of years,

to feast on the astonishing architectural richness of its classical past.

But many also come to see its great gardens,

most of which originate from a brief but golden age of gardening.

In a 50-year period from about 1550, there was suddenly an explosion of garden-making -

extraordinary, magnificent gardens -

and you have to wonder, why then?

Why round here, Rome?

And also, why gardens?

To find out, I'm going to visit the most spectacular of the gardens from this period, in and around Rome.

As well as getting to know these iconic gardens, I'll also be exploring the lives

and the turbulent times of the enormously powerful and wealthy men that made them.

Now, the greatest wealth and power in 16th-century Italy

was not in the hands of bankers or kings, but of the church.

The most powerful group of people in Rome in the 16th century

were the cardinals, and they all had their eyes fixed on just one seat of power,

and that was the papacy.

The Pope was the most influential man in the Christian world.

Every living soul in 16th-century Europe was either fiercely for or against him.

He had the greatest art collection in the world,

the greatest power, and access to vast wealth.

This intoxicating combination

was the prize that every aspiring cardinal greedily desired.

You have to picture Rome round about the middle of the 16th century

as a place that was asserting itself, and they were saying,

"We are the powerful people, this is God's city."

And right here in the Vatican, the single most powerful place on the planet,

God's representative ruling it,

and that gave the cardinals and the people working around the Vatican

an extraordinary sense of power, and brashness and confidence,

and that's the context in which you have to set these gardens that they were making.

When a pope died,

the cardinals elected one of their members to succeed him.

However, in the 16th century,

this was less a measure of their spiritual qualities

and more a result of how influential, rich and cultured they were,

and one way to demonstrate these attributes was by making an awe-inspiring garden.

I'm heading off an hour north to Villa Farnese in Caprarola,

which is a small town in the province of Viterbo, about 40 miles

from the centre of Rome, to visit one of these great gardens made by a power-hungry cardinal.

I've come to Villa Farnese mainly because I've always wanted to see it

but the reason why people have come here in such great numbers

is because it is generally reckoned to be one of the most perfect examples

of a surviving Renaissance garden.

This was the home of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese II, of the distinguished Farnese family.

His grandfather was Pope Paul III.

Pope Paul had originally commissioned the building

as a fortified castle, at a time when Rome was almost constantly at war.

But by the time the cardinal inherited it, in 1549,

all that had been built of this fortress

were the five-sided footings.

So in 1556, Farnese hired the architect Giacomo Vignola

to built an enormous palace on these existing foundations and to create the latest fashionable accessory -

a beautiful Renaissance garden.

There's no doubt that we have this idea that Italian gardens are all formality, clipped hedges, green -

at best a very mannered, calm, stately type of garden, but at worst

rather bleak, even hard and harsh, compared to our love of flowers,

and I think that's one of the things I want to know, what were they like?

How have they evolved? And is what we're seeing now

a true picture of Italian gardens as they've developed through history?

By the 1560s, when this garden was made, the Renaissance had been in full swing for over 100 years

and had produced an unprecedented flowering of new ideas in art,

architecture, literature, science and philosophy,

with artists such as Raphael,

Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

But this wasn't just about paintings and sculpture.

The Renaissance also launched the idea that a garden could be a work of art.

To find out more about this garden in particular,

and Renaissance gardens in general, I meet Giorgio Galletti,

a garden historian who's restored a number of Renaissance gardens

like Villa Farnese.

The ideas of order, and symmetry and harmony

were key parts of Renaissance thought, weren't they?

Vignola used pure geometry, and also he designed his garden

on pure geometry according to a square grid.

Architecture, not only gardens,

should be based on a pure geometry.

The idea of, the man should recreate the harmony of the universe,

and it has to be very simple

and very feasible to be understood by man.

Right.

This grid-like formality might appear constraining

to modern British gardeners, but it was designed to create order

out of chaos, placing man in controlled, and controlling,

harmony with nature.

As you climb steep steps to the top of the garden,

you leave the ordered formality behind and enter the bosco,

which was a wood designed for the cardinal and his guests

to indulge in his greatest pleasure -

hunting prey ranging from wild boar to songbirds.

It's best to think of the garden as a process, or a journey.

So you've gone from the ordered gardens down by the villa,

then up through the bosco - this place of excitement, of hunting,

of wild animals and nature red in tooth and claw, but controlled -

and then, as you come through the end of the bosco, there's a clearing, and in front of you...

is this apparition.

It's a fairy palace, it's an extraordinary, rich creation

rising up out of the ground,

and you've reached this state of absolute beauty.

This is where Alessandro Farnese entertained his fellow cardinals

and anyone - and in truth, that was everyone - that he wished to impress.

It is an astonishing ethereal fantasy that is built from stone,

water, vast riches and an even greater ambition.

The water features and sculpted cascades pointedly demonstrate

his culture and sophistication and,

at every turn, you can see clear symbols celebrating the greatness

of the Farnese dynasty.

All this fun and games was really part

of power play.

The most important thing that this is saying is, "I am a powerful man".

Think of this water being channelled down

in this marvellous staircase of water, made by dolphins.

Well, any visitor would have known the dolphin was the crest

of the Farnese family.

Alessandro's grandfather had been here.

He'd tasted it, he'd been close to the seat of power,

so he had about him this sense of right,

and the garden expresses that.

The river gods, the water coming from their cornucopias, go into a glass.

This is the fountain of the glass.

The idea of taking rivers, drinking them, holding them in your hand -

this wouldn't have gone unnoticed.

So the symbolism is almost as important as the aesthetic beauty.

Despite the jostling for position that went on between cardinals,

it was a very small world that they moved in,

and many would dine and hunt together as friends.

So when Farnese created this garden, fully ten years after the lower gardens were completed,

he turned to a fellow cardinal,

who himself had made a great garden nearby, for some advice.

This palazzina, a rather grand building up here at the top,

was recommended to Farnese by his neighbour, Cardinal Gambarra,

at Villa Lante, who fundamentally said,

"Look, old chap, you've got gout.

"Like me you find it a bit tricky when you're having your dinners outside on a summer's evening.

"Build yourself a shed at the end of the garden." So he did.

Very nice shed it is, too, and it was up here that they would relax.

The power play would be done and there would be wine and song,

if not women.

This garden is formed from an elaborate parterre

of crisp box hedging, superb sculptures

and the delightful play of water.

However, there is a notable absence of flowers of any kind.

Yet, according to Giorgio Galletti, Renaissance gardens like Farnese

would originally have been filled with colour.

There was a kind of symbolic flower garden,

particularly a lot of lemon pots.

When there was the fashion of the bulbs, all the cardinals and princes,

they were in competition to buy the rarest bulb.

Right. I you talk to most people in England now, they will say,

"But there are no flowers, it's all just evergreens and shapes and it's very beautiful, but limited".

So what you're saying is that was never the case?

Not in the Renaissance. There were jasmines, crocuses, lilies,

that was very important for the Farnese family,

because it was in their coat of arms,

and parts of small topiary in box.

So what happened to all the flowers?

Villa Farnese became abandoned and overgrown

when garden fashions changed and it wasn't restored

until the 20th century.

In many gardens like Farnese,

the only planting to survive was the box hedging, which in fact was often not original,

so restorers assumed that Renaissance gardens were flowerless.

It is quite a shock when you realise that the image of the Renaissance garden is actually inaccurate.

It wasn't like that, and that they wouldn't have used box

and it wouldn't have been green, and they would have had flowers.

And when I came to this top section,

I stood here for a bit thinking, "Well, I don't get it,

"I just don't feel any response to this rather flat open space and the green grass."

And it wasn't until I learnt that actually it wasn't like this,

it was full of flowers, it was like a physic garden with beds, with beautiful specimens

that they were gathering and were being given as presents.

When you think about it, why shouldn't Renaissance gardeners

have enjoyed flowers every bit as much as we do?

And I need to undo these preconceptions I have

of Italian gardens as being all about shape and structure and form,

and start to fill in the gaps with flowers and the pleasure of flowers,

just like I have in my own garden.

Alessandro died in 1589, just a few years after the palazzina was completed,

but his garden remained hugely influential, particularly

to his fellow cardinals, vying to outdo each other with the magnificence of their gardens.

The great outpouring of art and culture in the Renaissance,

with its emphasis on harmony and order,

was in part a reaction to centuries of chaos.

Throughout the whole medieval period, Italy was a patchwork of warring states,

and it had also been particularly devastated by the Black Death,

wiping out a third of its population, so by the beginning of the 15th century,

the Renaissance was inspired by looking back to the glories

of ancient Rome, which until then

had been almost completely ignored.

So I am now heading 15 miles east of Rome to an archaeological site

that had an enormous influence

on the great 16th-century burst of garden making.

This is Villa Adriana, which was built almost 2,000 years ago

by the Western world's most powerful man, the Emperor Hadrian.

The reason I've come to Hadrian's villa is not so much to admire

the garden, because that hasn't survived 2,000 years.

This hasn't been quietly growing for all that period, it's all recreated.

But there is enough evidence, enough of the layout,

to provide the spark that lit the fire for Renaissance gardens.

Although you can go to Renaissance gardens and you'll enjoy it -

you don't need to know everything about it, it's just lovely -

if you want to know the story and to understand it,

you have to pick up the threads, starting here in Hadrian's villa.

Hadrian built his villa in the early decades of the 2nd century AD,

at the same time as his famous wall was being built across the border between England and Scotland.

This was the emperor's palace,

his court, and the military headquarters for Rome's vast empire.

Hadrian travelled more widely than any other emperor

and his gardens were directly inspired

by ancient Greek and Egyptian architecture and mythology.

For hundreds and hundreds of years, the ruins just lay there,

ignored, and people didn't pay them any mind,

and it wasn't till the beginning of the Renaissance that people began reading the literature

and looking at the ruins, putting two and two together

and realising that there was something special here,

and gradually the columns, and the statues, and the water features

began to be potential that they could use in their own gardens and their own houses.

Now, if you think about it, we still take it for granted

there are columns and statues and temples in grand gardens.

But none of that existed

before the Renaissance rediscovered the classical world.

The part of this enormous, sprawling site

that most excited Renaissance visitors was the canopus,

which was a long colonnaded pool with statues all the way around,

culminating in a large banqueting hall with a great arched and domed opening.

I've arranged to meet Marina de Franceschini here,

an archaeologist who's been studying the villa for the last 20 years,

to find out just why the canopus was so important for Renaissance artists and architects.

I feel like dwarf, because if I think that here all the greatest architects of all times have come.

Palladio, Pirro Ligorio, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael

-and everybody else, so you...

-Yeah, yeah.

But everybody was coming here to take inspiration

and also because they were looking for measurements.

They were looking for the magical formula that would give them

the perfect proportion of buildings

and also they were trying to understand the secret of building

a place like this, that is still standing after so many centuries,

a thousand years of neglect.

The visiting 16th-century architects

came here not just to admire the aesthetics of the building,

but to re-discover practical engineering knowledge

that had been lost since the fall of the Roman Empire.

One vital lost skill was how to transport vast quantities of water.

Hadrian used a ten-mile long aqueduct just to supply

the villa's countless pools and fountains,

and the sheer volume of water needed for pools designed to cool

and reflect light into buildings

was a clear demonstration of the emperor's knowledge and power.

-You must imagine the water was flowing down.

-Down here?

-Down there.

-Yeah.

And then was flowing in these channels, and the middle water in this inner channel coming down.

So water playing, water moving and overflowing and...

Oh, yeah. Water was a way to show the power of the emperor, because

we know that there was an aqueduct to bring in water from the Aniene River.

But the water was part of the garden.

In a sense, it wasn't a practical purpose, it was for decorating.

-Yeah.

-And where did they eat? How did that happen?

-So they were lying here...

-On here?

-On this.

-So you lie on top of here?

Yeah, you must imagine that there were cushions. Pillows. Yeah.

And then there were the servants

bringing food, bringing drinks

and also I believe that over there,

there was a place for the emperor,

because that was the best place.

Imagine Hadrian, what kind of nice garden parties he was having here.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Really something exceptional.

And the lake and the water itself, would they have had boats or anything like that?

There were small boats, with people having feasts and orgies,

but mainly the beauty of the lake

was the reflection of the landscape.

You must imagine also a dinner party in the evening with candlelight.

With just the sound of music, dancers.

It was really something beautiful to see, and something impressive.

No, I'm impressed. Definitely.

Now, round the back of these seating areas is a doorway

and the public aren't allowed in here, but they've let me in

because it leads to the emperor's private quarters,

and presumably there were guards in here.

Now, this is where Hadrian would have his dinner, so all his guests

reclining down below, and remember these are just the selected few,

but he was on his own up here, and there was water and a pool here,

and in the alcoves you've got gods, you've got statues.

Now, you have to imagine this lined with marble,

so light spangling off the walls, white marble,

and this god-like emperor bathed in a halo of light.

And it would have been really powerful stuff, so that the garden,

the emperor, delicious food and song and entertainment and light, water,

all coming together and you can see, if you take that leap of imagination

and then apply it to the Renaissance

and these powerful cardinals, they want some of that magic.

They want Hadrian's magic, best of all.

1,400 years later,

one man set out to recapture the emperor's magic with his garden,

or even to outreach it.

The setting for this is just a mile up the hill from Hadrian's villa,

in the small town of Tivoli.

The garden I'm about to visit

was made by the most powerful, the most ambitious and the richest of all that pack of powerful cardinals

that were milling around the papacy

and he was given the governorship of Tivoli as a reward.

But it was a double-edged sword, because it kept him out of Rome.

And he poured his wealth and his ambition and, to some extent his frustration, into his garden.

This man was Cardinal Ippolito d'Este,

and his garden harnessed water and made it dance and perform

like no other before or since.

I've been to Villa d'Este a few times before.

You come in from the top but originally, it was designed

to arrive at the bottom of the garden, and then the visitor would slowly climb up this hill,

amazed at all the wonders they were seeing and thoroughly puffed

by the time they reached the top.

And that's how it was originally designed, so that it would unfold and reveal itself and, by the time

you reached the top, which is where the cardinal would have been, you were in a state of breathless awe.

Cardinal d'Este had vast wealth,

and an overwhelming desire to become pope.

When he failed in his first attempt in 1549,

he hired Rome's most distinguished architect, Pirro Ligorio,

to create the biggest and most ambitious water garden since Hadrian's villa.

Ligorio demolished whole streets to make room for the garden on the steep hillside,

and built a sophisticated system to bring water from a nearby aqueduct.

In today's money, all this would cost a cool £100 million.

But this wasn't just a matter of d'Este displaying his wealth

and artistic taste, although it was certainly that.

He also intended to impress visitors with the depth of his scientific knowledge.

And these were truly astonishing feats of hydro-engineering.

The scale of the water is just ridiculous, really.

Miles over the top, but what d'Este did was re-channel the water supplying the town,

and took a third of it - a third of the town's water supply -

to make his garden, so having done that, then he was determined

to do something big with it,

so he had an enormous hydro-technical display

and it still remains the most impressive I've ever seen,

and it all comes from one source, and there's no pumps at all.

The whole thing is powered by pressure, so they knew what they were up to.

By studying Villa Adriana,

Renaissance architects re-discovered ways of taming water

that had been lost for a thousand years.

They found they could control the water's speed and movement using

different size pipes and spouts and, with this new knowledge,

the artistic ambition of gardens

rose to new and astonishing creative heights.

This is the Terrace of 100 Fountains.

Took five years to make.

It uses water that comes from a single source, no pump, all the fountains have the same velocity,

the same rhythm, the same sound, and it builds up as we walk along.

It's like a musical instrument.

Now, poor old Cardinal d'Este, he hardly saw this.

It took five years at the end of his life and then was completed,

and behind this beauty is a nagging pain for him,

because the three layers of water represent rivers leading to Rome,

and of course, that's where d'Este wasn't, and that's where d'Este most of all wanted to be.

In the two decades it took to construct his garden,

Cardinal d'Este made five failed bids for the papal throne.

At every setback, his garden got grander and grander,

and the coded messages it sent out became ever more pointed.

The waters of the 100 Fountains

flow down here to a garden called Rometta and the story behind it is

that the Pope forbade Cardinal d'Este to build a palace in Rome,

because he knew that he would challenge his power,

so d'Este petulantly said,

"OK, I can't have my palace in Rome,

"I'll have Rome in my palace"

And so he built a model of Rome.

Rometta was originally more than twice its current size,

but most of it was demolished in the 19th century.

However, in the 16th century,

d'Este's guests would have been able to see an elaborate model

encompassing the whole of Rome, and thus the power of the papacy

in his garden, with its own Pantheon and a Coliseum,

and they certainly would have understood the message intended

by this statue of Romulus and Remus, the founding fathers of Rome.

I think what this garden really displays -

they didn't really go for meditative calm or obvious floral beauty in the way that we do.

What they wanted were fun and games, they wanted drama,

and apparently this was d'Este's favourite bit of the garden,

and he used to put on theatrical performances here and there were all sorts of things going on.

There were fountains, there was allegory, there are people prancing about dressed up, no doubt.

The whole thing is busy with drama, and that's the way they liked it.

The simplicity, symmetry and harmony of early Renaissance gardens

were being replaced by a new fashion for the dramatic.

Gardens now engaged and entertained the visitor with spectacular,

highly theatrical displays, and there was a new spirit of playfulness,

with a constant intent to surprise and delight,

typically with water jokes, designed to give you a good soaking when you were least expecting it.

This fountain, by the way, is meant to surprise you.

It suddenly springs up and I have actually been here before when

it became even more playful, so it may happen any minute.

But the whole point was to have jokes. Gardens were places to delight, and surprise,

and amaze and entertain you, and if you'd got money,

then of course that entertainment can get very elaborate indeed,

and this whole square can fill with water.

To the modern eye, d'Este's garden seems somewhat kitsch and garish,

but this was a world where moneyed good taste ran easily

from Palestrina masses and Michelangelo

to musical water fountains.

There's a common perception that Cardinal d'Este built this garden

out of anger and frustration because he couldn't be pope, but I think, I'm not sure that's right.

I think that, obviously, he did want to be pope and he was very cross about it,

but I think the really interesting thing is that he lived in an age

when very powerful, very rich men

expressed that power and that creative energy

by building a garden.

I mean, just as now an oligarch buy himself a football team

or a newspaper, it seems to be that it was acceptable to make a garden,

and that would impress other rich men.

And so what we have is a flowering, where wealth and power

expressed itself in gardens, and I can't think of another age when that was true.

Despite all his wealth and all his power,

d'Este ran up huge debts creating his garden,

and he never did become pope.

Back in the centre of Rome, the Borghese Gardens were originally built for the Borghese family

in Renaissance times, but are today managed by the state, and are the city's most popular public space.

There are a few great public gardens in Rome, and my favourite of these,

the ones at Villa Borghese, come here on a Sunday -

I'm losing my ice cream - or a Bank Holiday, they're packed,

mainly with local people using them, playing, enjoying, walking in these exquisite gardens.

It's just a lovely place to come and relax with the local Romans,

and it's certainly worlds apart from the Rome of 500 years ago.

The confidence and even arrogance displayed by the 16th-century cardinals through their gardens

superficially exudes a sense of invincibility, but in fact, it was a turbulent and uneasy period.

Just a few years earlier, Rome had endured one of the worst traumas

of its entire history at the hands of the Holy Roman emperor, the Spanish King Charles V.

It's all too easy to build up this picture of high Renaissance Rome

as this glorious place, untroubled, with great and grand men in control,

but in fact in 1527, there was the Sack of Rome,

and 30,000 troops of Charles V came in and pillaged and raped

and destroyed the city.

Beautiful gardens were lost,

buildings burnt down and that wasn't just a loss of material,

it was a crisis of confidence,

and all these great cardinals and leaders, with their money and their power,

knew that they could lose the whole thing at a stroke.

Life was very tenuous,

and the next garden I'm going to tells that very vividly and graphically,

all in a relatively small garden, tucked away in woodland.

The garden I'm about to see is unlike any other.

And certainly completely different from the other great gardens of the age.

To get to it, I'm heading back north again, to a small hilltop town not far from Caprarola called Bomarzo.

The town is dominated by a large palace

belonging to the noble and ancient Orsini family.

In 1552, one of the family created

a Renaissance garden like no other.

But it's separate from the palace,

down in the valley below, hidden within a nearby wood.

This is the Sacro Bosco, or sacred wood, and everything about

it is completely different from the other great gardens of the period.

Harmony and symmetry are replaced by twisting pathways.

It's full of fantasies and visions that loom out of the trees,

and for an age that believed absolutely in goblins,

ghosts and woodland sprites, they are spiced with real horror.

If you think of the more conventional gardens,

they're laid out, they're imposed on the landscape.

Streets are moved, areas are flattened, water is brought in

by aqueducts, an enormous effort to bring mankind to dominate it.

But you can't help having a feeling here that they walked round, had a look at it, saw the trees,

saw these enormous lumps of rock and thought, "Oh, we could do something with that"

and it is extraordinary that these great lumps of stone like this

were just there, and they hacked into it on the spot.

The Sacro Bosco was created by Duke Vicino Orsini.

The Orsini family had included three popes and dozens of cardinals,

but Vicino Orsini was a man of action - a soldier and a poet,

as well as being distinctly hard-up.

He married into the wealthy Farnese family, which did enable him

to make the garden, but his resources remains limited.

However, although his garden lacked in elaborate engineering or architecture,

he loaded it with anarchic riddles

and visual puns which no-one has ever fully deciphered.

At the garden's heart is a giant mouth of hell.

It's a reference to Dante's Inferno,

but the inscription advises the visitor to abandon all "thought", rather than hope.

There is this grotesque mouth with nostrils like cannons,

and it's like a child going, "Grrrr!"

And then when you go inside,

it's rather charming. It's like a little picnic house.

And you can imagine the Duke and his chums coming down here

and having a bottle of wine and some cheese in this cool,

rather elegant room.

There is a building in the garden -

a solid two-storey house, but it leans drunkenly into the hillside.

Ooh.

It has been suggested that it symbolises the collapsing fortunes of the house of Orsini.

The house has been built at a slope.

It's leaning.

It's falling, and certainly the 16th-century visitor

would've appreciated the pun on house, household, family,

the name, you know, at a tilt.

And of course, one of the ironies is that this falling, leaning house

is still standing strong after 500 years.

Try and stand up, and I get the wobblies.

Really, really weird!

What I absolutely love is the green.

The way that you go from earth to stone to tree,

with this one green that goes up through it and then, you know, a sculpture comes along too,

but wood and natural stone and ground and sculpture

all become part of the same thing, and that's just lovely.

Presumably it wasn't like that when it was made, of course.

Again, it's where time changes the garden for the better.

It certainly would've originally looked very different,

because all these beautiful, mossy and weather-worn sculptures

would originally have been painted in bright, gaudy colours.

Look how lovely this is. It's a good gardening lesson.

If you want moss, you've got to have poor drainage, ie stone or bark,

shade and water and then it'll flourish.

Orsini was a soldier of fortune.

A mercenary, fighting for the Pope amongst others,

so it's no surprise that one of his main themes is the abuse of power.

Here, the colossal figure of Hercules takes his righteous,

if deservingly rapacious revenge on Cacus, who has stolen his cattle.

And one message comes through loud and clear

in this garden, which is that Orsini is challenging the over-weening confidence and pride

displayed in the grand gardens of Rome's ruling class.

I think this garden -

it's almost a revolt against the attempt to apply order

that the Renaissance had done to gardens and life in general.

This idea that if you make everything symmetrical, then somehow life will become controlled.

And what Orsini's doing here, I think, he's saying,

"Well, life isn't like that."

Life is uncontrollable and strange, and there's war and there's violence

and, you know, you can be married and you love your wife, but you can have lots of lovers, which he did.

You can lust after other people, you can...be a man of peace and of art,

but go to war and kill people.

And it's almost a stab at early psychology,

and so he's built this place,

which has some beauty, but then suddenly...

looming out of the mist is a monster,

a monster of the imagination, and I suspect that's a bit too

fanciful, trying to interpret the whole thing in that way,

but certainly, that element seems to be here.

In the end, Bomarzo remains an enigma, and rightly so.

It's a beautiful and disturbing tangle that would be diminished if it were unravelled.

Bomarzo's eccentricity was a reaction against the pretension and pomp of the cardinals,

and they were becoming political loose cannons,

hell-bent on creating increasingly ostentatious gardens.

I'm now heading 12 miles south of Rome, to the town of Frascati.

Its cooler climate made it a popular spot for the cardinals to escape Rome's burning heat

and build their summer villas.

And this, of course, meant making gardens.

But there was a major problem -

insufficient water.

The fashion for ambitious water features, like those of Villa d'Este,

were literally running Frascati dry.

The battle over water rights that followed was highly un-Christian.

We think of cardinals as being good men,

holy men, but actually, power corrupted them spectacularly

throughout this period,

and some of them were warlords, they were murderers, they were robbers.

Every venial sin they could commit, they had a go at it.

And in fact, they used to scupper each other's gardens by destroying the water supply.

If you couldn't have water, you couldn't have a decent garden.

In 1598, Pope Clement VIII gave his nephew,

Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, this site,

dominating the town, on which to build himself a villa,

and critically he also provided the money - 50,000 scudi,

£5m at today's value,

to fund a brand new aqueduct

that gave the town a reliable water supply, but only after the garden

had taken its fill.

I arrive on hedge-trimming day.

The Italians are invariably expert when it comes to pruning trees.

This 200-yard-long tunnelled avenue,

whose exterior has been clipped

to a monstrous hedge,

is, I think, topiary at its finest.

From the outside, this looks like a solid block of hedge.

Now, from the inside, these are great big trees,

and I'm pretty sure they were planted as a hedge and they've been allowed to grow out massively for,

I don't know, 100 years or something, I suspect,

and then have been clipped back, so what you have is a halfway house.

You've got great oak trees and inside all the bones showing,

like the inside of a beached whale

and then on the outside, this box front of foliage...

..and only time will bring this.

Only time and neglect can make something as beautiful as this.

The heavy skies open, and the rain sends me on up to the shelter of the villa.

This was given to Cardinal Aldobrandini as a reward

for negotiating a peace treaty with France.

It was an extremely generous gift,

and also a canny one because popes aren't allowed to own property.

So it was a way that Clement was able to keep it in the family.

The peace treaty gave Rome control of the key town of Ferrara,

along with a sizeable chunk of the d'Este family fortune.

These spoils allowed Aldobrandini to create a villa and a garden

to outshine all those of his Frascati neighbours.

The villa isn't usually open to the public,

so it's a rare privilege to be allowed inside.

Inside the villa is a painting

of Cardinal Aldobrandini.

And there he is - a surprisingly young man really.

Apparently, he was a man of great power and intellect and organisational skills...

and this was all made for him.

By the time Cardinal Aldobrandini came to build his villa,

a new movement had replaced the Renaissance.

This was the Baroque.

Baroque was a style of architecture

and garden design that was dramatic, elaborate, triumphant

and very confident, and was underpinned by the desire

to re-assert the supremacy of the Catholic Church over Protestant enemies.

One of the interesting things when you look at gardens is that you obviously do your homework.

You see photographs, you look at books...but nothing,

nothing prepares you for the reality.

And, of course, the honest response

is to be flabbergasted.

Can't really think of anything sensible to say,

because just the scale of the thing...

Whilst at first glance, the water theatre might seem to be decorated

with a series of anonymous mythical characters from classical Rome,

it is in fact a celebration of papal ,power and the Aldobrandini name...

with a symbolism all of their contemporaries would have recognised immediately.

So Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders represents Pope Clement...

and at his feet, triumphantly rising out of the sea,

is the heroic head of Hercules,

symbolising Cardinal Aldobrandini.

They loved this idea of masque, which was one-off theatre.

Enormously expensive, put on as a performance to impress those in power. And this is what this is.

It's gardening as grand display for a select few,

and it's very symbolic that it's not open to the public.

It's still just you and I looking at this and a handful of other people, and the performance is for us.

Above the water theatre, a cascade flows and bounces down steps

to the balustrade below,

with a tall pair of columns flanking it.

It was designed so that it is wider at the top,

and the foreshortening makes it appear steeper and more dramatic,

especially when viewed from the villa.

Pietro Aldobrandini and his guests would look across

and applaud the water spiralling down the columns into the balustrades

either side of the cascade,

and then down into the theatre as a performance and spectacle

as dramatic and entertaining as any opera.

The cascade as it stands is impressive.

A roar of water coming down, but actually it's only half the action,

because the two columns at the top have got spirals,

and originally water came out the top, worked its way round,

came splashing down,

spilling into the pool below.

And so you had the central cascade,

you had the spirals at the top whizzing around like firecrackers

made out of water, and then the balustrades coming over the edge.

So the whole thing... was wildly over the top, very kitsch and probably really good fun.

Huh! Here we go.

You see the channel...

that comes round, it's really quite big.

So quite a lot of water would come down here, picking up speed as it went, throwing light onto the mosaic

and coming down to go down these balustrades and...

the important thing is that you have that fantastic aspect of the villa,

that they have a brilliant view of what's going on, particularly from the top,

which was the viewing platform for the cardinal and his friends,

because it wasn't just the theatre down below they wanted to see, but also this.

Up here on this level is as much again, if not more.

The top of the garden has been derelict since the Second World War,

when it was badly damaged by American bombers during the Allied invasion.

That's enchanting.

This is the only grand papal garden not owned by the state.

It remains in private hands,

still owned and still lived in by the Aldobrandini family.

Looking after a garden and villa like this is a mammoth undertaking,

however, the current owner Prince Camillo Aldobrandini

is embarking on the formidable job of restoration.

Well, you see, there is some scaffolding

and we are hoping to make a quite important work of restoration, especially for the fountains,

which are in a very bad state.

-It was bombed during the war.

-Yeah.

My father restored it, but having new cement, it's now in a very bad state.

Everything has to be repaired again.

-And of course, the water...

-Yes.

..is a huge issue because it's still quite a big thing

-to have that water running, isn't it?

-Yes. We have an aqueduct,

actually, and the water then was used for this villa,

and we sell the water to the villages around here.

Right. So does the garden always have a good supply of water?

No. There are some moments in autumn when there is no water in the fountains.

-Right.

-We're now starting to put a recycling outfit,

so that the same water can be used over and over again.

And to what extent would you ever consider restoration

to a particular date?

Are you putting the garden back to the 16th century, or...?

I wouldn't. It would be a pity to cut down trees.

In the Italian mentality, countryside villas

were usually a repetition of urban houses,

and so they didn't want to have too many trees,

just wanted to have a house,

and very low gardens and statues.

And presumably, some things have been lost from this?

Yeah. There were statues all over this balustrade, and they were taken by Napoleon.

Napoleon took all the statues and belongings of his brother-in-law,

and his brother-in-law's brother,

which was my great-grandfather, and he said he would pay them

after he would come back from Russia.

Unfortunately, things didn't turn out...as planned.

Not quite. It's a very good story.

At the garden's highest point is the main water supply, still flowing

from the same aqueduct Cardinal Aldobrandini built 400 years ago.

The last cascade is the most natural and, I think, the most charming, too.

It's got real elegance, and of course, that was the idea -

that as you got away from the palace,

everything became more natural and blended into the wild, but very, very controlled.

This was wilderness absolutely under the thumb of man.

In the 21st century, nature's taken over, places have been cleared,

trees have grown, they've decayed, and because it's a private garden, it feels intimate.

It feels that you're seeing something very personal,

and I'm not sure I'd like this to be fully restored and made public

and gleaming, and a historical document.

I think part of the magic is that it almost feels

like it could disappear at any time.

So it's more precious.

Villa Aldobrandini is still astonishingly grand,

but age has given it an air of engaging scruffiness

that I think makes it all the more charming.

On my tour around these great gardens of Rome,

I've seen gardens designed to entertain and to shock,

but above all, to impress.

And how they succeeded,

although not perhaps as they intended,

as they continue to impress and influence gardeners and tourists for the next 400 years.

And it remains an astonishing thought

that they were all made within such a brief period of time.

During this 50-year period at the end of the 16th century,

the cardinals vied with each other for the papacy like dogs in a pack,

and the gardens that they were making were not for a love of plants or horticulture, as such.

They were primarily to impress each other, to show their power

in order that they could become the Pope themselves, and the irony is,

of course, that none of them, none of these great garden makers

ever made it to the top table.

But what they left behind were not so much a piece of history

showing how powerful they were,

but a set of some of the most beautiful gardens

the world has ever seen.

Next time, I'll be in Florence,

where the creative revolution of the Renaissance not only changed art

and architecture, but also transformed gardens of every kind.

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