For years, our friend Valerio Trufelli had a photo in his shop...his then four-year-old daughter Anna standing in the mouth of a huge stone scupture.
The sculpture, Valerio told us, was in a park full of sculptures both fanciful and grotesque. There was nothing else quite like it.
So when some friends from Siena asked us if we wanted to take a field trip with them, we jumped at the chance. Carol suggested the Park of the Monsters at Bomarzo...more properly know as "the Sacred Forest."
It's a collection of 38 basalt sculptures carefully placed along a winding path through a 7-1/2 acre forest packed with creatures from mythology and literature.
Wait a minute! This doesn't look at all like any Italian art we've seen before. Whose idea was this, and how did it get here?
This all started with Pier Francesco Orsini. The Orsini are one of the great noble families from Rome, dating back to the 12th century and boasting 34 Cardinals and three Popes.
Pier Francesco spent his teenage years being tutored in the classics and contemporary literature. In 1546, he joins the army Holy Roman Emperor to fight in the religious wars and is taken prisoner. When finally released, he retires to Bomarzo. After years of conflict with the Colonnas, another Roman family of equal status, he secures the property for his forest. He dedicated the park to his late wife, a member of the noble Farnese clan.
This is the era of the High Renaissanc, typified by the portrait at the right.
The fantastical and grotesque forms Orsini had in mind for his sculpture garden stand in stark contrast to the prevailing fashion of his day. To fulfill his vision, he hired Pirro Ligorio, the architect who worked on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome after the death of Michaelangelo.
The sculptures at Bomarzo proved groundbreaking, transforming into stone the style of frescos found in Nero's villa. They became immensely popular among the upper classes in Italy.
Let's start with the grotesque. Here, a dragon slays a lion...a direct reference to a scene from the epic poem Orlando Furioso, which was one of the great literary achievements of Orsini's time and is still mandatory reading for today's high school students.
The purpose of Ligorio's sculptures was not to please the viewers but to astonish them.
From the same poem, the hero Orlando has just been spurned by his beloved Angelica. He crosses paths with a poor woodcutter and in an insane rage he dismembers the man.
This statue of Neptune was once a fountain.
Neptune, the god of the sea, was in Roman times also considered the god of the Tiber River...which runs through the valley where Bemarzo is located.
In this sculpture, the goddess Fortune balances on a ball atop a tortoise...symbolizing how precarious good fortune can be.
The tortoise measures more than ten feet long, consistent with the larger-than-life size of most of the pieces in the park.
And here we are with our friends Ellen and Lenny, standing at the most famous of all the sculptures in the park...Hell's Mouth. It's Orsini's homage to Dante's nine circles of Hell. The inscription above the door is an intentional misquote of Dante's famous line, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter."
This sculpture is commonly known as the Orc (Ogre), from whence JRR Tolkein got the name for his villains in Lord of the Rings.
Unfortunately, this sculpture garden was not well treated by time. For three centuries it lay abandoned, until just after WW II the Bettini family bought the property and restored it to its present state.
Who'd think, a small snapshot of a four-year-old girl would open the doors and lead to us discovering something so groundbreaking?
