Slow Travel for Architecture Lovers

Italy

WHERE IT WASN'T, AS IT WASN'T

I got there by motorbike in June 2019, two months after the Notre-Dame fire, and didn't connect the two. It took me seven years.

Veil-like cascade falling from a great basin into the oval pool of the Oval Fountain, among climbing plants and balustrades, at Villa d'Este

Italy

VILLA D'ESTE — WATER AS A BUILDING MATERIAL

Villa d'Este is not a garden with fountains. It is a hydraulic machine, and a map you can walk, built between six lost conclaves by a man who never got to Rome, and who brought Rome home instead.

Villa d'Este, Tivoli, from the terrace: cypresses, the garden below, the roofs of the town and the plain towards Rome

Day Trip From Rome

Tivoli Day Trip from Rome: Villa d'Este, Hadrian's Villa, and How to Do Both

Two villas three kilometres apart, an emperor and a cardinal, water and ruins. Which one to choose if you have to, the order to do both in, tickets and hours, and the waterfall if you still have an hour.

Italy

AS IT WAS — BUT WHEN?

I was sitting under St Mark's Campanile and I knew it dates from 1912. It was no use to me, until Notre-Dame put the right question in front of me.

The giant stone head of the Orcus at the Monster Park of Bomarzo, its wide-open mouth a doorway with steps leading in, among the trees

Day Trip From Rome

Bomarzo Monster Park with Kids: A Day Trip from Rome, and the Afternoon in Viterbo

A wood full of stone giants, a crooked house you walk into, an hour and a half with no route to follow. Tickets, the family timetable, the pushchair question, and Viterbo in the afternoon.

Italy

CAPRAROLA — THE FRESCOES AS A POLITICAL MANIFESTO

Read in order, the rooms of Caprarola stop being decoration and become an argument: from the Farnese lands to the map of the world, from the cardinal's family history to a room where a whisper crosses the corners.

Front view of Villa Farnese at Caprarola from the lower square, with the double ramp of stairs, the terraces and the five-arched loggia under a blue sky

Day Trip From Rome

Villa Farnese at Caprarola: A Day Trip from Rome That Starts at the Bottom of the Hill

A five-sided palace at the top of a straight street, built so that you would arrive on foot. Where to park, what the ticket covers, the gardens' hours, and what to add in the afternoon.

A small child walks away down a side aisle of Chartres Cathedral, between blackened vaults and a half-cleaned pier, towards the bright nave at the far end

France

THE CATHEDRAL WITHOUT SHADOWS

I walked into Notre-Dame and found it flat. Then I discovered that the man who designed its light calls himself a sculptor of shadows.

A footpath beneath the eroded tufa cliff of Civita di Bagnoregio, under a blue summer sky

Day Trip From Rome

Civita di Bagnoregio Day Trip: When to Go, What to See, and the Walk Nobody Does

A village on a crumbling cliff, a bridge to reach it, a valley of clay all around. Winter or summer, how long to stay, and the walk almost nobody takes.

The round travertine tomb of Caecilia Metella crowned with medieval battlements, rising above holm oaks beside the Appian Way under a clear blue sky

Strata

THE APPIAN WAY — THE ROAD ON TOP OF A VOLCANO

On the Appian Way you ride higher than the fields. It isn't an impression: you are on the back of a lava flow that stopped exactly where the tomb of Caecilia Metella stands.

Looking up at the Gothic façade of Orvieto Cathedral: gold mosaics, carved pinnacles and the rose window against a blue sky with white clouds

Day Trip From Rome

Orvieto Day Trip from Rome: What's Worth It, What to Skip

An hour and a quarter by train, a cliff of tufa, a façade built to be seen from twenty kilometres away. What's worth the trip, what to skip, and where to stand.

Architecture

BOMARZO — THE GARDEN THAT DOESN'T EXPLAIN ITSELF

Every great sixteenth-century garden answers your questions before you ask them. Bomarzo doesn't. On the wood without an axis, and the grief that built it.