Villa Lante

The Villa Lante is in Bagnaia a district of Viterbo in Italy.

Casini

The most original building was built in 1477 by Cardinal Raffaele Riario. This was a hunting lodge for Pope Leo X. Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Gambara began in 1566 with the construction of a villa under the supervision of the architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola. 1573 the first casino was completed; a second was Cardinal Alessandro Peretti built in 1587. These two Casini represent the center of the park dar. 1656 changed Ippolito Lante the building and the park slightly. The frescoes in the Stanza della Caccia of the so-called casino Gambara Antonio Tempesta be attributed.

Garden

The park was also created by Vignola in terraces on a hillside: Stairs and ramps to pull down on the slope. At the foot of the hill is a fountain with bronze statues by Taddeo Lantini. Pavilions, which are not parallel to each other, but at an oblique angle, causing the whole assembly for the uphill rising onlooker seems wide, while, viewed from above results in a narrowing and the space between the pavilions appear optically limited.

Water plays an important role in this park: a system of wells and watercourses takes place over the entire hillside. The park is an early example of the symbiosis of natural and cultural landscape.

Garden Description

At the foot of the hill is a formal garden. In its center a square fountain ( Fontana del quadrato ) is a circular pool in the center. Four figures of naked youths, they will Taddeo Lantini ascribed to keep the crest of Mont Alto.

Behind the twin buildings of Casini the terrain rises, and in this first stage are the lights fountain and the caves of Venus and Neptune. Above the road widens to a terrace, which is in the middle of a stone table dominated ( The board of the Cardinal ), which has a water-filled channel in the longitudinal axis. This wine and fruit could be cooled.

Hang Windwärts rises the giant fountain fed by a water chain. The water chain originates from the mouth of a cancer ( gambero ) and runs the water being constantly distracted by stones that lie in its course down from the slope. The top terrace is adorned with the octagonal fountain dolphin with several superimposed shells. It concludes with the two loggias of the Muses. They enclose a grotto in which the spring rises, which feeds the water garden.

The garden tells the story of a lost paradise, which was rediscovered. It begins at the foot of a big hill, where he represented the distant and simple past, when people were in the natural state. The garden then progresses through three terraces and ends the culminating point in the Golden Age of the Cardinal, who built the garden. The Universe is here represented in miniature in the garden. Gardens have always been, in a sense analogies of the universe, as it was understood at the appropriate time. The universe is mirrored in this garden, moves to the current high performance of Italian art and science.