THE Roman campagna has, alas, been steadily encroached upon since the late nineteenth century. But the great aqueduct, so beloved by the young Corot, survives, and on a fresh morning or a cloudless evening one can still see the world as Claude did. The pope continues to retreat to Castel Gandolfo and numerous villas and gardens survive. But if the visitor to Rome has time only for a single excursion, Tivoli must win.
Villa Adriana: the north wall of the Stoa, 118–34.
The town hangs above the west bank of the river Aniene as it breaks through a barrier of rock to plunge into a deep gorge. The drama of the setting and the splendour of the views down over the campagna were clearly admired in ancient times, and from the seventeenth century few landscapes were painted more often.
Of the Roman town the outstanding survivor is the circular Temple of the Sibyl (or Vesta) that overhangs the falls of the Aniene. This owes its exceptional state of preservation for a monument in so exposed a place to its adaptation as a church in the medieval period. Within the town, several early churches survive. The finest is perhaps the Romanesque San Silvestro on the picturesque Via del Colle, to the south-west of the late Duomo, which contains a notable thirteenth-century carved group of the Deposition. Late Romanesque Santa Maria Maggiore adjoins the greatest monument of the town, the Villa d’Este.
Cardinal Ippolito d’Este was appointed governor of Tivoli in 1550, and proceeded to replace his official residence with a spectacular villa designed by the Neapolitan Pirro Ligorio, who was in so many ways the artistic heir of Giulio Romano. The architecture is magnificent and the villa retains much of its frescoed decoration. But the glory of the Villa d’Este is the garden laid out on the sloping ground below, with cascading terraces that offer, as it were, a formal counterpoint to the natural falls of the Aniene nearby. Ligorio himself was responsible for much of what survives, including the Fontana dell’Ovato and the Fontana dei Draghi, supposedly thrown up in a single night in honour of Pope Gregory XIII’s visit in 1572. The garden was quickly recognized as the ne plus ultra of Renaissance design, and its echo can be sensed in many later schemes as far afield as Jacobean England.
Villa Adriana: the villa of the island, 118–34.
The second of the great gardens of Tivoli is very different in character. The Villa Gregoriana is opposite the Temple of the Sibyl, entered from the Largo Sant’Angelo at the eastern end of the Ponte Gregoriano, built for Pope Gregory XVI (1831–46). The area had been built on in Roman times, but the garden, which has recently been restored, is a late creation of the Romantic movement. The circuit is punctuated by grottoes – that of Neptune was once a channel of the river – and the Belvedere, placed for the spectacular view of the Great Cascade.
At the foot of the valley into which the Aniene falls are the ruins of the vast complex of the Villa Adriana, built between AD 118 and 134 for the Emperor Hadrian. He travelled extensively for strategic reasons, and monuments in Alexandria and Greece were among those he sought to evoke in what Robin Lane-Fox has recently described as a theme park. The villa was first explored in the sixteenth century and received much attention from eighteenth-century excavators in pursuit of statues. The small site museum only houses those found since 1951. For the non-archaeologist, the charm of the site owes much to the juxtaposition of the ruins and the wooded hillside, the contours of which were intelligently exploited by the emperor’s builders.