> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.theslowarchitect.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # VILLA D’ESTE — THE OTHER SIDE: FRESCOES, AUTOMATA, MYSTERIES - URL: https://www.theslowarchitect.com/villa-d-este-the-other-side/ - Published: 2026-10-12T07:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-22T17:51:16.000Z - Description: At the gate of Bomarzo a sphinx asks whether marvels are made by deception or by art. Take her to Villa d'Este: the palace is painted to lie, the fountains play music and birdsong, and the man who designed it all invented inscriptions. Room by room, the other side of the garden. - Author: Giulio Romano - Tags: Italy, Architecture, Lazio, Essay At the entrance to the Sacro Bosco of Bomarzo, a stone sphinx puts a carved question to the visitor: whether so many marvels were made by deception, or by art. The sphinx lives at Bomarzo, but if you want to take her on a journey, take her to Villa d'Este. [In the piece on the garden I told you about the machine](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/villa-deste-tivoli-water/), the gravity, the earthworks, the map made of water, the six conclaves, and the machine is all art. But the villa has another side, and that side is full of deceptions: rooms painted to look like what they are not, an organ that hid its mechanism so well that a pope wanted to look inside, fake birds performing a little play, a goddess moved into a corner so that she would catch the eye less, and a designer who studied antiquity and, when it suited him, invented it. Almost everyone hurries through the palace, in the rush of people who can already hear the fountains beyond the windows. I photographed every one of the information panels in the rooms, one by one, and I opened them again while I was writing: they made me correct more than one thing. Let us go back inside, slowly, hunting for deceptions, and keep the sphinx's question in our pocket, because we will need it at the end. [If you are planning the trip, the practical guide is here.](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/tivoli-day-trip-from-rome/) ## The First Thing the Palace Hides: Itself What you walk through was not born as a palace. It is an old Franciscan convent, attached to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which Ligorio disguised as a cardinal's residence. The entrance courtyard, with its portico, still carries the memory of that cloister, and the irregular shape of the building is the scar, never fully hidden, of what was there before. Keep it in mind as you climb: you are walking through a convent in disguise. ![Courtyard with an arcaded portico, potted citrus trees and an upper loggia under a blue sky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/01_cortile-ex-chiostro.jpg) The entrance courtyard: beneath the palace, the memory of the convent. ![Fountain in a niche framed by columns and a pediment, on one side of the courtyard, with the bell tower behind](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/02_fontana-del-cortile.jpg) The courtyard fountain, the first water you meet. The rooms, one after another, are a catalogue of Roman Mannerism in the second half of the sixteenth century. The first campaign of frescoes began in 1565, coordinated by Girolamo Muziano; with him and after him came Federico Zuccari, Cesare Nebbia, Livio Agresti, Matteo Neroni and Durante Alberti. Not hired hands: some of the most sought-after painters in Rome, at work on the walls of a provincial villa between 1565 and the early 1570s. This too is a way of saying "I am rich": not a single masterpiece, but a whole team of outstanding hands. ## The Rooms That Paint the Water The route follows a precise logic: the interiors double the garden. Coffin showed it: the symbolism of the rooms complements that of the fountains, but you can feel it with your own eyes, room by room. The room that is worth the journey on its own is the Hall of Moses. At the centre of the vault Moses strikes the rock and water gushes out to quench the thirst of the people of Israel camped in the desert. It looks like a straightforward biblical subject. It isn't. The room's panel says so plainly: the scene alludes to Cardinal Ippolito, who made new fountains spring from the steep slopes of the Tiburtine mountain. The Old Testament miracle is his hydraulic feat dressed up as Scripture. Remember the conduit under Tivoli in the main piece? There it is, on the ceiling, with Moses standing in for the cardinal. I know of no more shameless allegory of a patron's power, nor a more beautiful one: having yourself celebrated as the prophet who commands the water. On the walls, between pilasters and herms, wide views of landscapes and water open up and make the room feel larger. The frescoes are probably by Durante Alberti and his assistants, from 1570–71, perhaps to designs by Muziano. And the room has a twin: in the nearby Room of Noah, the room of the Flood, the theme is water again, and the four cardinal virtues are shared between the two vaults. ![Corner of a frescoed room with painted herms framing a landscape with water, beneath a decorated vault](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/03_sala-mose-erme-e-paesaggio.jpg) The Hall of Moses: between painted herms, views of landscapes and water that widen the room. Then come the two Tiburtine Rooms, painted before 1569 by a team led by Cesare Nebbia, where the palace tells the founding myth of the place: the three Greek brothers Tiburtus, Catillus and Coras landing in Latium and founding Tibur, named after the eldest; Hercules, protector of Tivoli and of the Este; and, in the second room, the story of Ino becoming the Sibyl Albunea, with the chariot of Apollo and the rivers Tiber, Aniene and Erculaneo. The same Sibyl who, outside, crowns the Oval Fountain. And here, for anyone who works on building sites, is the gift. Among the founding stories, one panel of the vault shows the building of the walls of Tibur: stonecutters bent over blocks, a man levering with a pole, ladders, scaffolding, a winch on top of the walls. A sixteenth-century building site dressed up as myth. And in the same room, among the views of the territory, the Oval Fountain is painted still under construction: the villa painting its own portrait while its building site is still open. ![Fresco of stonecutters working on stone blocks, men with levers, ladders and a winch on the walls of a city under construction](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/04_cantiere-dipinto_prima-stanza-tiburtina.jpg) A sixteenth-century building site dressed up as myth: the building of the walls of Tibur, in the First Tiburtine Room. The great set piece is the Salon of the Fountain, looking out over the garden. It was the banqueting hall of the cardinal and his court of poets and men of letters, and on the vault there is a Feast of the Gods inspired by Raphael's at the Farnesina: the gods at table above the guests at table. Here the deceptions multiply. The twisted columns painted on the walls, imitating the "Solomonic" columns of St Peter's, feign an open loggia onto the landscape, hung with garlands of fruit, flowers and vegetables. The main scene shows the villa and the garden according to the design of 1565: a building that contains its own portrait. And at the end of the room there is a small rustic fountain covered in mosaics and enamels, with the Temple of the Sibyl in its niche, designed by the fountain-maker Curzio Maccarone and finished in 1568 by Paolo Calandrino. A note of honesty: the great views were recovered after 1920 and heavily restored after the war. What you see is also a restoration. ![Large frescoed room with a painted landscape on the end wall and a vault decorated with stucco and painting](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/05_salone-della-fontana.jpg) The Salon of the Fountain, the banqueting hall. Next door is the Hall of Hercules, the first to be frescoed together with the Salon, in 1565–66, by six painters coordinated by Muziano. The hero's labours run around the vault, and at the centre comes the epilogue: Hercules, his twelve trials behind him, is welcomed among the gods of Olympus. We see him from behind, the lion's skin across his back, leaning on his club. Hercules, always him: the legendary forefather of the Este, the guardian of the apples of the Hesperides that give meaning to the whole garden outside. ![Frescoed vault with a central panel of figures among clouds, surrounded by frames, coats of arms and grotesques](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/06_volta-sala-ercole.jpg) The vault of the Hall of Hercules. At the centre, the hero welcomed among the gods. Then the Hall of Nobility and the Room of Glory, painted by Federico Zuccari between 1566 and 1568\. I spoke about Fortune with her cardinal's hat and papal tiara in the piece on the garden. Here I will add two deceptions. On the walls, two painted cupboards with half-drawn curtains, as in fifteenth-century studioli, and on their shelves, once again, the hat and the tiara. And six panels of fake antique busts, marble philosophers that are only paint. At the centre of the vault there was meant to be Glory. The panel has been lost. ![Trompe-l'oeil bust of a bearded philosopher on a pedestal inscribed SOCRATE, in front of a painted curtain](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/07_finto-busto-socrate.jpg) Socrates, marble in appearance only: one of the fake antique busts. ![Frescoed vault with octagonal panels and allegorical figures around a central panel with no painting](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/08_volta-gloria-riquadro-perduto.jpg) Glory was meant to be at the centre of the vault. The panel has been lost. The last is the Hall of the Hunt, and it belongs to another age: it dates from 1614, attributed to Giovanni Ferri and Rinaldo Lombardo after engravings by Antonio Tempesta. Tapestries that are only paint, hanging game trophies that are only paint, hunting scenes on land and on water, naval battles, shipwrecks, a fire: the four elements, air, water, earth and fire. ![Hanging game painted in trompe-l'oeil between two decorative bands with geometric patterns and flowers](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/09_trofeo-di-caccia-dipinto.jpg) A hunting trophy that is only paint. The Hall of the Hunt, 1614. ![Frescoed landscape with a towered village, an arched bridge over a waterfall and two figures in the foreground ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/10_paesaggio-sala-caccia.jpg) A landscape in the Hall of the Hunt: a bridge, a tower, a waterfall. Outside, in the upper part of the garden, beneath the Loggia of the Winds, is the Grotto of Diana: a nymphaeum clad in mosaic, built between 1570 and 1572, with sea scenes on the vaults and stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses on the walls. It once held four ancient statues, two Amazons, a Minerva and a Diana, none of them there any longer. It stayed closed for almost half a century and reopened in May 2025, after two years of restoration. If you go, look for it. ## The Organ a Pope Wanted to Inspect I described the mechanics of the Fountain of the Organ in the piece on the garden. What matters here is the effect it had on people. In the sixteenth century a fountain that played music by itself was not "fascinating": it was inexplicable. The story goes that Gregory XIII, visiting the villa, was so astonished that he wanted to check in person that nobody was hidden inside, playing. The pope looking for the musician behind the trick, and finding only water. It is the anecdote that tells you everything about what these gardens were: not places to look at, but machines for astonishment. The sphinx's question, deception or art, has only one answer here: the deception was the art. The organ by Leclerc and Venard became famous at once and was imitated, at Pratolino in Tuscany and at the Quirinal in Rome. The one at Tivoli decayed quickly; the 2003 restoration brought it back to life, and it plays every two hours from 10.30 am. Go and hear it knowing what you are listening to, and remember that three centuries later this same water would lead Liszt to write his Jeux d'eau. ![Niche with a statue of a male nude between two telamons, on the banded façade of the Fountain of the Organ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/11_nicchia-fontana-organo.jpg) One of the niches of the Fountain of the Organ. ## The Comedy of the Fake Birds Not far away is my favourite deception: the Fountain of the Owl. Inside its niche was a hydraulic automaton by the same French water masters: some twenty bronze birds that chirped with air driven by water, like a little organ. Then, at intervals, an owl appeared, and the birds fell suddenly silent, only to start singing again when the owl went away. In the sixteenth century, using nothing but the pressure of water, they built a small drama with a plot: nature singing, the threat that silences it, life starting over. Not a fountain: an automatic stage scene, repeated endlessly without a motor. A fake nature that imitated the real one so well it enchanted people, while a few metres away, beyond the wall, the real one sang for free. The mechanism has been restored and the owl sings again at set times during the day: check the times on the Villae website before you go. ![Stone aedicule with mosaic-decorated pilasters, Este eagles on top and a tiered fountain in the niche](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/12_edicola-fontana_civetta.jpg) The Fountain of the Owl. ## The Pope's Dragons In the piece on the garden I left you in September 1572: Gregory XIII, the last pope elected in Ippolito's place, visiting Tivoli. Here is what the cardinal prepared for him. The Fountain of the Dragons is the iconographic fulcrum of the garden: it alludes to the eleventh labour of Hercules, the golden apples guarded by the dragon Ladon. But at the centre of the basin there is not one dragon. There are four winged dragons, modelled in 1572 precisely for the pope's visit, because a winged dragon stood on Gregory XIII's coat of arms. A building-site legend says the group was put in place in a single night, on the eve of the pope's arrival: there is no way to prove it, but the gesture is true in spirit. And the fountain did more than spout: in Ligorio's design, the hydraulic engineer Tommaso Ghinucci had obtained, by varying the water pressure, "warlike" sounds imitating the shots and bangs of firearms. From the early seventeenth century people called it the fountain of the Girandola. A fountain prepared to flatter the man who has just beaten you, dressing the family mythology up as a heraldic tribute: Hercules for himself, the dragon for the pope, everyone happy. It was the last move of a player who did not know how to stop. Three months later Ippolito was dead. The dragons are still there, and they still spit water. ![Group of stone dragons at the centre of a basin, with a tall jet of water and the staircase behind](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/13_draghi.jpg) The winged dragons, modelled in 1572 for the visit of Gregory XIII. ## The Goddess Moved into the Corner Here is the mystery I like best, because it is ideological architecture in its purest form. What we now call the Fountain of the Organ was originally called the Fountain of the Flood, or of Mother Nature, after the statue that stood at its centre: a many-breasted Nature on the model of Diana of Ephesus, an ancient image of fertility, carved by the Fleming Gillis van den Vliete, who in Italy became Egidio della Riviera. Then the climate changed. In the early seventeenth century Cardinal Alessandro d'Este had the fountain restored: the statue was moved against the boundary wall, in the lower part of the garden, where it still stands, and in its place, in the great central niche, the octagonal little temple that houses the organ was built. The Counter-Reformation looked at pagan images with growing suspicion, and a fertility goddess at the centre of a cardinal's garden had become, half a century later, awkward. So the goddess was not destroyed. She was moved: from protagonist to peripheral detail, with the discretion of someone who wants no scandal in any direction. It is a correction you can read the way you read a building altered over the centuries: the cultivated paganism of the 1560s, corrected by the cautious Catholicism of the early seventeenth century. The garden is not an object frozen in the Renaissance. It is a palimpsest. And the exiled goddess, whom you can go and visit in her corner, is its deception by subtraction. ## The Antiquary Who Invented Inscriptions One last shadow, the largest, because it hangs over everything else. The man who conceived this garden, so dense with references to antiquity, is the same man epigraphers have for centuries accused of inventing Latin inscriptions. Pirro Ligorio compiled dozens of volumes of Antichità, an illustrated encyclopaedia of the ancient world that his contemporaries admired for its ability to reconstruct fragmentary monuments and complete them with imagination. The trouble is that those volumes contain hundreds of inscriptions nobody has ever seen on a stone: some reconstructed with too much fantasy, many probably invented. Among epigraphers, "Ligorian" is almost a label of suspicion. In 1565 he was also arrested and held for about a week, accused of taking antiquities from the sites he was running; he came out, but the shadow stayed. And it is a thought that hangs over the whole of Villa d'Este: how much of what we read as "ancient" in this garden is philological recovery, and how much the invention of a man who could make the plausible more convincing than the true? The sphinx's question, once again: deception or art? With Ligorio, the answer is that there is no answer, because in him the two were the same talent. The garden, like his inscriptions, is document and fiction at once. Perhaps that is why it works. ## One Last Marvel, Perhaps Made by Deception First, though, a real loss. The extraordinary collection of ancient statues that Ippolito had assembled, much of it taken from [Hadrian's Villa](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/tivoli-day-trip-from-rome/), is no longer here. In the eighteenth century, when the villa belonged to the dukes of Modena and was left to decay, the statues were sold piece by piece; by the end of the century the collection was gone, and the villa itself passed to the Habsburgs. And then there is her. A local legend says that a woman dressed in white wanders these rooms, and that she is the ghost of Lucrezia Borgia, Ippolito's mother, the name the piece on the garden begins with. Lucrezia died in 1519, forty years before the villa existed; but legends do not check dates. I do not believe it, of course, and I do not ask you to. Yet it seems right to me that the last marvel of Villa d'Este should be a story nobody can verify, set in the villa a man built for a glory he never obtained. The sphinx asks: deception or art? With Lucrezia's ghost, for once, the answer is simple: it is storytelling. Which is what remains when art and deception have finished their work. ![Spiral staircase in pale stone seen from below, its dark railing drawing a spiral](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/14_scala-a-chiocciola.jpg) A spiral staircase, seen from below. ## The Thread That Holds It All Together If there is one key that opens the palace as well as the garden, it is the one I closed the other piece with. Everything here, the rooms that feign loggias and tapestries, the Moses who is Ippolito, Fortune with the tiara, the organ hiding a musician who is not there, the birds that act, the dragons modelled to flatter a rival, the goddess moved aside, the invented inscriptions, comes from one man's obsession with the thing he never obtained. Ippolito II d'Este, Este blood and Borgia blood, lost six conclaves and built, between one defeat and the next, a world where at least the water obeys, the birds sing on command and even the victorious pope is left open-mouthed. The sphinx of Bomarzo asks whether marvels are made by deception or by art. Villa d'Este answers: out of revenge. Which is the mother of both. For the context, who Ligorio was, how the ground was built, the gravity-fed hydraulics, the map made of water and the six conclaves, the main piece is here. → [VILLA D'ESTE — WATER AS A BUILDING MATERIAL](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/villa-deste-tivoli-water/) How to visit Villa d'Este and Hadrian's Villa, as a day trip from Rome From Rome 40 min by car, 1 h by train Time needed 2 hours per villa, a full day for both Tickets €15 each, €30 the pass for both Best time October to April; summer only for Villa d'Este Hours, tickets, how to get there, the order of the day and what to combine it with are in the practical guide, which is the page I keep up to date: [Tivoli Day Trip from Rome: Villa d'Este, Hadrian's Villa, and How to Do Both](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/tivoli-day-trip-from-rome/). Last checked: October 2026\. Prices and hours change: always check the official sites before you travel. Five day trips from Rome are in the [free guide](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/day-trips-from-rome-guide/). ## Further Reading David R. Coffin, The Villa d'Este at Tivoli, Princeton University Press, 1960\. The source for the interiors too: it is Coffin who shows that the frescoes in the rooms and the fountains in the garden carry out the same programme, each complementing the other. Carmelo Occhipinti, Giardino delle Esperidi, Rome, 2009\. Invaluable for the documents: payments to painters and sculptors, inventories, who did what and for how many scudi. In Italian. Luke Morgan, The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016\. It is not only about Tivoli, but it is the right book for understanding the sixteenth-century taste for artifice in gardens: the context in which the organ, the owl and the dragons stop looking like oddities and become a language. "Ligorio, Pirro", Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Treccani, online). The most balanced account of the antiquary and his inscriptions, without sensationalism. In Italian. The official Villae website (villae.cultura.gov.it): opening times, restorations, which rooms and fountains are open. Worth checking before you go.