Villa d'Este

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Park of the Villa d'Este, Carl Blechen, 1830.

The Villa d'Este is a villa situated at Tivoli, near Rome. Listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, it is a masterpiece of Italian architecture and especially garden design. The chief painter of the ambitious internal decoration was Livio Agresti from Forlì.

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 villa, which had entirely reconstructed to plans of Pirro Ligorio under the direction of the Ferrarese architect Alberto Galvani. From 1550 until his death in 1572, when the villa was nearing completion, he created a palatial setting surrounded by a fabulous 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.

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 a 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.

The Neptune Fountain (foreground) and Water Organ (background) in the gardens at the Villa d'Este.

Pirro Ligorio, who was responsible for the icongraphic programs worked out in the villa's frescos, was also commissioned to lay out the gardens for the villa, with the assistance of Thomaso Chiruchi of Bologna, one of the most skilled hydraulic engineers of the 16th century, who 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.

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 and 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 Blechten (illustration) and other painters was reversed during the tenure of Cardinal Gustav von Hohenlohe, who 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..

The Villa was celebrated in poetry, painting and music.

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.

Coordinates: 41°57′45″N, 12°47′46″E