Flora Romana

While we were visiting the water gardens at Villa d'Este yesterday in Tivoli, we saw in Cardinal d'Este Palace a painting exhibit called Flora Romana or Roman flowers. The naturalistic genre of flower painting became established in Rome towards the end of the 16th century. A nice change in painting styles brought about by the Renaissance, I do get tired of Virgin in Child.
By the end of the 16th century, Rome became one of the most important centres of medical experimentation and botanical research of the time. During those years books were printed in Europe containing only images of flowers, the passion for botanical collection was spreading. It was around 1583 that never seen plants from the New World started appearing in Europe, painters indulge patrons, Jan Breughel the Elder was a master of the genre and he was copied in Italy.

Mario Nuzzi began to compile a vast archive of drawings of the most rare flowers in Roman gardens at the request of the Cardinal nephew of Pope Urban VIII. The great Princely families of the Court of the Pope started to compete amongst themselves to have the most beautiful gardens and rarest blooms. This led Mario Nuzzi to develop art markets for floral paintings and great artists would compete for commissions from patrons and art dealers. This way families could show off the product of their gardens and give paintings as gifts to distinguish and powerful friends they wanted to please. Some of the painters who found favor with wealthy patrons, Abraham Breughel, Francesco Mantovano and Jean Baptiste Mannoyer.

It was very interesting to see these paintings of flowers and plants we take for granted because they have become common in our gardens today, forgetting that 500 years ago, these flowers and plants had never been seen in Europe and were ''new'' to European eyes.

long Weekend

August 1 weekend is a long weekend for us, as we celebrate not Switzerland but that Canadian Province Ontario.
Beautiful day, it is also the first weekend of the start of the month long vacation holiday season in Italy and in other european countries like France.
We drove about 35 minutes from Rome to Tivoli today to visit the water gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli.

The Villa d'Este was commissioned by Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, son of Alfonso I d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia and grandson of Pope Alexander VI. He had been appointed Governor of Tivoli by Pope Julius III, with the gift of the existing villa, which he had entirely reconstructed to plans of Pirro Ligorio carried out under the direction of the Ferrarese architect-engineer Alberto Galvani, court architect of the Este. The chief painter of the ambitious internal decoration was Livio Agresti from Forlì. From 1550 until his death in 1572, when the villa was nearing completion, Cardinal d'Este created a palatial setting surrounded by a spectacular terraced garden in the late-Renaissance mannerist style, which took full advantage of the dramatic slope but required innovations in bringing a sufficient water supply, which was employed in cascades, water tanks, troughs and pools, water jets and fountains, giochi d'acqua or jeux d'eau. The result is one of the series of great 17th century villas with water-play structures in the hills surrounding the Roman Campagna, such as the Villa Lante, the Villa Farnese at Caprarola and the Villas Aldobrandini and Torlonia in Frascati. Their garden planning and their water features were imitated in the next two centuries from Portugal to Poland.

Drawing inspiration and much of the marble used for construction from the nearby Villa Adriana, the palatial retreat of Emperor Hadrian, and reviving Roman techniques of hydraulic engineering to supply water to an unexampled sequence of fountains, the cardinal created an elaborate fantasy garden whose mixture of architectural elements and water features had an enormous influence on European landscape design.
Pirro Ligorio, who was responsible for the iconographic programs worked out in the villa's frescos, was also commissioned to lay out the gardens for the villa, with the assistance of Tommaso Chiruchi of Bologna, one of the most skilled hydraulic engineers of the sixteenth century; Chiruchi had worked on the fountains at Villa Lante. At Villa d'Este he was assisted in the technical designs for the fountains by a Frenchman, Claude Venard, who was an experienced manufacturer of hydraulic organs. The organs plays on the hour, renaissance Court Music.


Cardinal Alessandro d'Este repaired and extended the gardens from 1605. In the eighteenth century the villa and its gardens passed to the House of Habsburg after Ercole III d'Este bequeathed it to his daughter Maria Beatrice, married to Grand Duke Ferdinand of Habsburg. The villa and its gardens were neglected. The hydraulics fell into disuse, and many of the sculptures commissioned by Ippolito d'Este were scattered to other sites. The picturesque sense of decay recorded by Carl Blechen and other painters was reversed during the tenure of Prince Cardinal Gustav von Hohenlohe; the Cardinal hosted Franz Liszt, who evoked the garden in his Les Jeux d'Eaux à la Villa d'Este and gave one of his last concerts here. Villa d'Este was purchased for the Italian State after World War I, restored, and refurnished with paintings from the storerooms of the Galleria Nazionale, Rome.
The grounds of the Villa d'Este also house the Museo Didattico del Libro Antico, a teaching museum for the study and conservation of antiquarian books.

Me standing on a tower with the water jets some 30 meters below me. Yes that is a real Borsalino Panama I am wearing.

After our visit we went to a very nice restaurant for lunch just a few steps away from Villa d'Este. We had roast lamb, it was delicious. The restaurant is called Ristorante Angolino di Mirko, there is the pastry shop attached to it Antichi Pastai on Vicolo della Missione and a B&B La Fontana di Pegaso, all just outside the Villa D'Este. Tivoli is a small town but it has a lot of nice things to see, not to mention the panorama.

The narrow gate of the City of Tivoli. The streets are wide enough for one car, so drive slowly.