Modern Landscaping Lessons From A Historic Italian Garden
On a trip to Villa d’Este—a fountain-strewn, Renaissance-era estate outside Rome—our writer learns the secrets to crafting a truly immersive garden.
3 min
It seems as if I have always known of the Villa d‘Este, the celebrated Renaissance villa and adjoining gardens northeast of Rome, but until this spring I really didn’t know much about it. I was dimly aware of the complex’s influence on landscape design, especially the fountain-rich, terraced gardens behind the frescoed house, but I couldn’t really work up a picture in my mind. Then, during a trip to Rome this spring, I decided to find out what the five-hundred-year-old fuss was about and hailed a taxi on the Via Veneto in the early morning traffic.
Located in Tivoli, a playground for ancient and Renaissance Romans about 20 miles from the Colosseum, the Villa d’Este was the brainchild of Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este (1509–1572), son of Renaissance art patron and Duke of Ferrara Alfonso d’Este and his controversial wife, Spanish-Italian power player and putative poisoner, Lucrezia Borgia. These days, it is reached only after a rather dispiriting trip through the anonymous eastern suburbs and exurbs of contemporary Rome, which might as well be outside Rome, N.Y. Even the entrance to the complex is kind of sad, off a small-town square with a curious work of menacing public art. But then the jaw-dropping splendor begins.
The stately villa, whose wholly frescoed interiors are spectacular enough, is perched above the gardens, which swoop down over countless levels, crisscrossed by a skyscraper’s worth of staircases and punctuated by some 50 sculptural fountains that run the gamut from large to huge to building-size.
A technical marvel in its time—and a Unesco World Heritage site and museum today—the 11-acre site’s sunken gardens use gravity to turn the local Aniene River into a constant motor for fountains, pools and dozens of artificial waterfalls. The Villa d’Este relies on the basic building blocks of Renaissance garden design—evergreen trees and Italian stone—to frame and fashion the gurgling, rushing and sheer wetness of all that water, which is not only meant to be seen but heard, felt and even endured, splashing you in the face when you least expect it.
The gardens start with…a pause.
Between the house and the garden slope is a quiet vialone, or avenue, bordered by a low wall and punctuated by elevated ceramic pots. This allows the mind to catch its breath between the fabulous frescoes and the watery wonderland beneath.
I heard falling water before I saw it, then my eye traveled to the right, to the so-called Hundred Fountains, a lane along which grotesque masks shoot water into a trough. Then I descended to the Cypress Rotunda, a giant display of twisting trees, some dating back to the 17th century.
Down I went, to the long array of fish ponds, or decorative reflecting pools, which lead the eye up to the Fountain of Neptune and, beyond, to the Fountain of the Organ, which uses river water to power an actual organ.
Then up I went to the piazza-fronted Oval Fountain, whose mammoth cascade of water suggests a glistening glass curtain, and back down again to the Fountain of Diana, a surreal multi-breasted symbol of fertility. I was getting tired, and hot, and after breathing the heady aromas of the rose garden, I paused in the cool darkness of the Grottoes of the Sibyls.
As it turns out, I was supposed to get tired, said Michael Lee, a professor in the history of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia, and a fellow this spring at the American Academy in Rome. The gardens are dense in mythological imagery, and the need to hike up and down was meant to “re-enact the labors of Hercules,” he said. I was expected to get tired and wet and hot and to notice the sounds of the fountains increase from nearly musical to almost deafening.
“The Villa d’Este is meant to be immersive,” said Prof. Lee, engaging all our senses, while later western garden design, from the French formal variety to the English landscape version, became ever more visual.
I later asked landscape designer Adam Woodruff, in Marblehead, Mass., how a gardener of more modest means and acreage could make a plot immersive. In his own meadow-style garden he converted a circular zinc planter, about 3 feet in diameter, into a reflecting pool. By adding a bit of black dye formulated for the purpose, he made the surface mirrorlike, so that sky and flower stalks prettily echo off the water. Thirsty birds steadily supply bird song (and avian-safe mosquito larvicide keeps bugs from breeding there). The simple vessel serves as a strategic focal point in the loosely structured garden, which includes a number of grass species.
Feeding all the senses was but one of the lessons Villa d’Este offers the home gardener. Others include creating a buffer between your house and your garden. Don’t be afraid to add humor, or even a bit of the grotesque. Save a place among the plants for stones, water, a statue or two or even a whole fountain.
The spring morning at the complex had turned into an almost summery afternoon, but now the weather grew overcast and faintly fall-like. It was time to go back to Rome, wetter and wiser, with the reminder that great design—in a garden, as in a house—should be lived rather than just looked at.
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Vacationers scratching their travel itch this season are sending prices through the roof. Here’s how some are making trade-offs.
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Capri Coffer socks away $600 a month to help fund her travels. The Atlanta health-insurance account executive and her husband couldn’t justify a family vacation to the Dominican Republic this summer, though, given what she calls “astronomical” plane ticket prices of $800 each.
The price was too high for younger family members, even with Coffer defraying some of the costs.
Instead, the family of six will pile into a rented minivan come August and drive to Hilton Head Island, S.C., where Coffer booked a beach house for $650 a night. Her budget excluding food for the two-night trip is about $1,600, compared with the $6,000 price she was quoted for a three-night trip to Punta Cana.
“That way, everyone can still be together and we can still have that family time,” she says.
With hotel prices and airfares stubbornly high as the 2023 travel rush continues—and overall inflation squeezing household budgets—this summer is shaping up as the season of travel trade-offs for many of us.
Average daily hotel rates in the top 25 U.S. markets topped $180 year-to-date through April, increasing 9.9% from a year ago and 15.6% from 2019, according to hospitality-data firm STR.
Online travel sites report more steep increases for summer ticket prices, with Kayak pegging the increase at 35% based on traveler searches. (Perhaps there is no more solid evidence of higher ticket prices than airline executives’ repeated gushing about strong demand, which gives them pricing power.)
The high prices and economic concerns don’t mean we’ll all be bunking in hostels and flying Spirit Airlines with no luggage. Travellers who aren’t going all-out are compromising in a variety of ways to keep the summer vacation tradition alive, travel agents and analysts say.
“They’re still out there and traveling despite some pretty real economic headwinds,” says Mike Daher, Deloitte’s U.S. transportation, hospitality and services leader. “They’re just being more creative in how they spend their limited dollars.”
For some, that means a cheaper hotel. Hotels.com says global search interest in three-star hotels is up more than 20% globally. Booking app HotelTonight says nearly one in three bookings in the first quarter were for “basic” hotels, compared with 27% in the same period in 2019.
For other travellers, the trade-offs include a shorter trip, a different destination, passing on premium seat upgrades on full-service airlines or switching to no-frills airlines. Budget-airline executives have said on earnings calls that they see evidence of travellers trading down.
Deloitte’s 2023 summer travel survey, released Tuesday, found that average spending on “marquee” trips this year is expected to decline to $2,930 from $3,320 a year ago. Tighter budgets are a factor, he says.
Too much demand
Wendy Marley is no economics teacher, but says she’s spent a lot of time this year refreshing clients on the basics of supply and demand.
The AAA travel adviser, who works in the Boston area, says the lesson comes up every time a traveler with a set budget requests help planning a dreamy summer vacation in Europe.
“They’re just having complete sticker shock,” she says.
Marley has become a pro at Plan B destinations for this summer.
For one client celebrating a 25th wedding anniversary with a budget of $10,000 to $12,000 for a five-star June trip, she switched their attention from the pricey French Riviera or Amalfi Coast to a luxury resort on the Caribbean island of St. Barts.
To Yellowstone fans dismayed at ticket prices into Jackson, Wyo., and three-star lodges going for six-star prices, she recommends other national parks within driving distance of Massachusetts, including Acadia National Park in Maine.
For clients who love the all-inclusive nature of cruising but don’t want to shell out for plane tickets to Florida, she’s been booking cruises out of New York and New Jersey.
Not all of Marley’s clients are tweaking their plans this summer.
Michael McParland, a 78-year-old consultant in Needham, Mass., and his wife are treating their family to a luxury three-week Ireland getaway. They are flying business class on Aer Lingus and touring with Adventures by Disney. They initially booked the trip for 2020, so nothing was going to stand in the way this year.
McParland is most excited to take his teen grandsons up the mountain in Northern Ireland where his father tended sheep.
“We decided a number of years ago to give our grandsons memories,” he says. “Money is money. They don’t remember you for that.”
Fare first, then destination
Chima Enwere, a 28-year old piano teacher in Fayetteville, N.C., is also headed to the U.K., but not by design.
Enwere, who fell in love with Europe on trips the past few years, let airline ticket prices dictate his destination this summer to save money.
He was having a hard time finding reasonable flights out of Raleigh-Durham, N.C., so he asked for ideas in a Facebook travel group. One traveler found a round-trip flight on Delta to Scotland for $900 in late July with reasonable connections.
He was budgeting $1,500 for the entire trip—he stays in hostels to save money—but says he will have to spend more given the pricier-than-expected plane ticket.
“I saw that it was less than four digits and I just immediately booked it without even asking questions,” he says.
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