A cardinal’s villa at the edge of a hill town, its garden falling down the slope on one axis in terraces, stairs and water to the plain; a plausible place modelled on the gardens of Tivoli and Bagnaia, not a survey of either.
The Italian villa garden of the sixteenth century was made on a slope. Alberti had asked for a site on rising ground with air and a view, and Bramante’s Belvedere Court in the Vatican showed how a hillside could be cut into level terraces joined by stairs on one axis. At Tivoli, from 1560, Cardinal Ippolito d’Este built his garden below the old convent he made into a palace, so that the visitor came out of the town on to the top terrace and looked down the whole garden to the plain. At Bagnaia, from 1568, Cardinal Gambara’s garden runs the other way, from a gate at the foot of the town up through square parterres and terraces to the woods.
Here the villa stands on the top terrace, entered from a piazza of the hill town behind it. Below it the water runs down a stone chain between the stairs, feeds the hundred fountains along a terrace wall and a grotto in the lowest one, and ends in fishponds before the gate. Box-edged compartments fill the terraces, cypresses mark the axis and the sides, and a small walled garden beside the house is kept for the owner alone. Olives cover the lower slopes either side, holm oak and pine the steeper ground above.
Beyond the gate an avenue of cypresses crosses the plain past the villa’s farm and a wayside chapel. The garden is a composition of the hill as much as of its beds: its levels continue across the slope, and the town on the ridge shares its water.