The Route from Rome
The “Tiburtina” was the Roman eastern route to the Adriatic. It leaves the outskirts of the modern city to cross the Roman campagna and climb the steep hillside to Tivoli. On the way you pass the enormous city cemetery of Verano, recognizable, as all Italian cemeteries are, by cypress trees towering above the high walls. The cypress, evergreen and gracefully reaching up towards heaven, represents eternal life in cemeteries, and also often in Italian religious paintings. You pass the unlovely suburban sprawl of housing and small industries – a good place to comment on the undisciplined post-war development and housing difficulties – a great contrast with the glorious villa(s) you are going to see.
22 km outside Rome you pass Bagna di Tivoli – if you were outside the air-conditioned bus, you’d immediately recognize the spa by its all-pervading smell of sulphur. It was well known in Roman times. The waters are rich in carbons and sulphate and are used for many cures, involving either drinking (unpleasant taste!) or bathing in the waters, according to the illness to be dealt with. The spa can hold 1000 bathers in its 4 swimming pools. Now is a good chance to talk about Roman baths and the part they played in Roman life (and still play, eg also Montecatini – water and mud cures are still very much part of the medical scene and can be had on prescription).
The Travertine Marble Quarries
Next you see the travertine marble quarries on both sides of the road. This sort of marble is good for building and for larger sculptures destined to be displayed outdoors, but is rather coarse-grained and can’t compete for fine texture and milky whiteness with marble from Carrara, north of Pisa, where Michelangelo spent a great deal of time choosing raw material for the Pietà, Moses, etc. The travertine marble quarries provided the material for the Coliseum, St Peter’s, and countless Roman churches and fountains – eg Bernini’s colonnades which embrace the Piazza San Pietro, his Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona, and the Trevi Fountain designed by Salvi (1742-62). You can get your group to imagine the scene of the huge blocks being hauled back to Rome by horse and cart and talk about the building of these things If you haven’t had time already (see Rome notes).
Hadrian’s Villa – Villa Adriana
In classical times, Tivoli became a favourite countryside retreat for wealthy Romans, who built themselves charming villas on its hill. From their gardens, they would admire the beautiful view of the Roman campagna from their gardens and bask in the cool air – so refreshing after a hard week’s work in the Senate House and law courts of the hot, dusty city down in the valley of the Tiber. The finest and largest villa of all was built by the Emperor Hadrian (76‑138 AD).
Hadrian was the adopted son of the Emperor Trajan, who was known as Optimus Princeps, or the best of all rulers, and had enriched Rome with a new Forum, a marketplace (the remains of whose tiers of shops can still be seen off the Via IV Novembre), and a monumental column (still in place in the site of his forum Just off the Piazza Venezia) decorated with reliefs which spiral upwards depicting the story of his military campaigns. Hadrian, a highly cultivated young man, succeeded his adopted father in 117 AD, and proceeded to continue the building programme, finishing and putting up two of Rome’s most famous ancient monuments.
The Pantheon had been begun under Agrippa 150 years earlier (as the letters on the portico testify). Hadrian now completed it, giving it the huge circular hall we see today, surmounted by the vast concrete dome covered outside in sheets of shining gilded bronze (later stolen away by Bernini to make his St Peter’s balcacchino ‑ see Rome notes) – it must have been a wonderful sight, gleaming dazzlingly in the sun. Inside stood statues of the gods covered with Jewels, including Venus, who, according to Pliny, wore in her ears the two halves of the pearl Mark Anthony took from Cleopatra after she’d drunk its twin dissolved in vinegar to win a bet. Once the great temple was completed to his satisfaction, Hadrian began to construct his own mausoleum, known today as the Castel Sant Angelo, finished after his death by his heir (again adopted).
Hadrian visited almost every part of the Roman Empire on his campaigns and travels, and out on the beautiful slopes of the hillside at Tivoli, he determined to build himself the grandest country palace ever, which was to be a recreation of the finest monuments and sites of his great Empire ‑whose boundaries encompassed Britain (Hadrian’s Wall), Egypt and Greece. Hadrian ordered work on his villa to begin in 118 AD, the year after he became Emperor, and the magnificent Imperial Palace rose from the hillside.
If you visit the villa, you’ll see the remains of its great hall with doric pillars – the doric is the first and lowest of the three classical orders of architecture, recognisable by its plainness and lack of decoration, and considered suitable for public spaces such as halls, and for ground floor walls outside; ionic is the second order (smaller living rooms and bedrooms; second floor wells outside) with spiral “ram’s horn” column tops, and Corinthian is the third and most elaborate order, whose column tops are decorated with sprouting, curling acanthus leaves (top floor walls outside, and temple columns often use this highest order ‑ you’ll see lots of Corinthian capitals lying about the Roman Forum)
A separate Library Court was built to house Hadrian’s fine collection of books, divided into a Greek and a Latin section – you can still see its fine mosaic paved floor, and that of the infirmary alongside it (the fresh air of Tivoli must have been very good for invalids). There was a normal Roman amphitheatre, so that the Emperor could entertain his guests with the latest plays, and a circular marine theatre, for water-based entertainments – mock naval battles in miniature, perhaps. Several delightful water gardens and pools were built – the Poikile, taking its name
from a portico in Athens, and oriented so that one side was always comfortably shaded, and the Canopus with its temple ending, designed to remind Hadrian of the Egyptian town of Canope with its famous temple of Serapis, which one reached from Alexandria by canal, lined with temples and gardens.
You can also see the remains of beautifully designed bath houses, a nymphaeum, in which fountains would have played around statues, and a barracks to house the soldiers guarding the precious person of the Emperor. Life at Hadrian’s magnificent hillside palace of rest and culture must have been delightful and luxurious for him and his entourage. In 138 AD, Hadrian died, ill and broken with grief since the death of his young favourite, Antonio’s, four years earlier. His great villa soon fell into disrepair, forgotten by later generations, and its buildings became ruins, lying half buried and overgrown with almond trees and rambling vines. It was not to be rediscovered until the sixteenth century, when the builder of Tivoli’s other great attraction, the Villa dEste, started to excavate, and inspired by its architectural beauty and use of water, began his own country palace.
The Villa d’Este
Cardinal Ippolito d’Este’s mother was Lucrezia Borgia, illegitimate daughter of the notorious Rodrigo Borgia, alias Pope Alexander VI (elected in 1492, as Lorenzo de Medici lay dying in Florence, and much further away, Christopher Columbus was busy landing on the shores of the New World). Rodrigo’s reign as Pope was extremely scandalous – other Popes had sold ecclesiastical offices, promoted their families, double-crossed their supposed friends and kept mistresses, but had done these things on the sly, attempting, at least, to keep up appearances, Rodrigo did them with unashamed, ill-concealed gusto, throwing wild parties at the Vatican, having his official mistress’s portrait painted as the Virgin Mary (whilst seeing countless other women on the side), and promoting the interests of his children by her.
The most notorious of these was Cesare Borgia, the ostensible hero of Machiavelli’s The Prince (whose advice on politics and statesmanship includes the famous maxim “the end justifies the means”): Macchievelli met and admired this ruthless young power-monger, who murdered his brother amongst many other victims, and was said to share his sister Lucrezia’s bed with his father (almost certainly untrue – Rodrigo Borgia was Spanish and therefore resented as a foreign Pope by the Italians, who delighted in spreading vicious rumours about his family). Lucrezia, with her long blonde heir and gilded lifestyle, was married several times, providing Roman scandal-mongers with great material for sinister whisperings (she had killed this husband with a poisoned ring; jealous Cesare had that one murdered).
Lucrezia’s third husband, Alphonso d’Este, provided her with a son, Ippolito (1509-1572), who was brought up in his father’s sophisticated and cultivated Renaissance court at Ferrara (between Bologna and Venice in
the north of Italy). Ippolito was destined for the church – at ten years old he was made Archbishop of Milan and at fourteen, he became a Cardinal. When he was 27, he was sent to the French court to represent the d’Este family, and became a great friend of Francis I and a member of his Private Council. Francis I was an enthusiastic and discerning collector and patron of the arts – he’d brought Leonardo da Vinci over to France, and Ippolito must have formed much of his own taste during his life at Francis’s wonderful Renaissance palaces of Fontainebleau, Chambord, Amboise and Blois.
On the death of Francis I, Ippolito returned to Italy (Henri II disliked him), and hoped to be made Pope, but this was not to be. Instead he was given the governership of Tivoli in 1550 and immediately after his triumphal inauguration, set to work simultaneously excavating Hadrian’s Villa and starting building work on his own little palace, the Villa d’Este, employing the architect Pirro Ligorio amongst other artists. Ligorio, as erudite about antiquity and classical mythology as his master and knowledgeable also on the subject of ancient hydraulic techniques, was instructed to build Ippolito a palace and garden which would celebrate the nobility of his lineage, glorify his virtues and deeds, and convey to all who visited it the depth of Ippolito’s culture and pre-eminence as patron of the arts.
The villa, sited on top of the hill in Tivoli, was perfectly integrated in design with its gardens, set in the ground falling sharply away behind. It was decorated inside, as befitted its status as the country retreat of a great Cardinal prince, with the eagles of his family crest, rustic fountains and painted frescoes depicting views of the garden delights awaiting his guests outside as well as scenes of classical deities and stories, especially Hercules (in legend, guardian of the region of Tivoli and ancestor of the d’Este family) and Hippolytus, Ippolito’s virtuous mythological namesake (resisted the advances of his stepmother Phaedra).
The concentration on Hercules was important in another way, too: he’d worked through his great Labours without being overcome, just as Ippolito and his architects worked triumphantly to build a magnificent garden full of fountains on a steep, waterless hillside. Perspective, that crucial Renaissance discovery (see Florence notes), is important here too, as you look out from the central loggia of the villa down the gardens, or from one fountain to the next, you will be able to see that it was always in the designers’ minds – each view is like a charming painting, with a distant point of interest at the end. Ligorio brought water through a tunnel a kilometre in length from the Aniene River, and using only his knowledge of water pressure (no pumps), provided enough for the many fountains to play constantly – a tremendous achievement.
In the garden, your group will see the Avenue of a Hundred Fountains, bubbling coolly from stone steps grown green and bulbous with ancient moss; the goddess Diana’s Grotto with its walls covered in shell and coral reliefs telling stories from Ovid (Daphne metamorphosed into a laurel tree, Diana hunting, etc); the Roma Fountain, where the sculpture of a little boat whose mast Is an obelisk reminds us of the Isole Tiberine and the obelisks
of Rome; the Fountain of the Waterfall, with its great fan and basin of water in a semicircular arcade peopled with nymphs (it’s said that if you walk behind it, the nymphs will transform you so that you’ll come out looking ten years younger!) and the Fountain of the Organ, where, beneath Ippolito’s family eagle, an airtight chamber was built behind 22 organ pipes so that the water, falling rapidly, forced the air out as lovely music. There are countless other intriguing fountains to see in this perfect and harmonious example of a late Renaissance prince’s imagination and desire to please and impress his guests.