Best Western
Hotel Viterbo

Villa Lante

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Address: Via Jacopo Barozzi, 71 -Bagnaia (Vt)
Tel: 0761-2880088
Web Site: www.bagnaia.vt.it
e-mail: info@bagnaia.vt.it
Hours: 8:30 - 16:30 closed Mondays
Guided visits available from 9 am to sunset
Tickets: 2 euro

The splendid 1500's complex, realized in various phases, includes a park and an Italian styled garden elaborated with fountains and two symmetric palaces, Gambara and Montalto, done by a project accredited to Vignola.
The idea initiated and became concrete at the end of the 15th century when Cardinal Raffaele Riario began the creation of a park in Bagnaia destined for hunting; his nephew, Ottaviano Visconti, continued work on the encircling and fencing of the park, also building the Casino di Caccia (1521), while it was Cardinal Nicolò Ridolfi, in 1532, who brought the water from a nearby spring inside the park to the first basin called Conservone.
The main project of the Villa had to wait until 1568, the year in which the young Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Gambara, settled in Bagnaia; he enjoyed the protection of the nearby Farnese family who were finishing their own Villa Fortezza in the town of Caprarola, and asked to use their architect, Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, for the project of Villa Bagnaia.
The project foresaw the construction of two twin palaces whose architecture, simple and classic, was a model from the Belvedere Vatican done by Bramante at the beginning of 1500 with the same conception of giving value to the surrounding spaces and the desire, therefore, to put focus on the magnificence of the gardens and fountains.
In 1578, we could say that work on the first palace Gambara, and the Italian Garden was at enough of a completion for a visit by Pope Gregory XIII.
The internal decorations are attributed to a group of artists who also worked on the Farnes Palace in Caprarola: Rafaellino da Reggio and his pupil Giovan Battista Lombardelli, Antonio Tempesta and the school of the Zuccari brothers.
In the loggia, completely frescoed with grotesqueries and mythological scenes, one can observe four precious views from the most beautiful villa in all of Lazio: the same Villa Gambara in Bagnaia, Villa d'Estate in Tivoli, Farnese Palace in Caprarola and Capodimonte.
The name of the Cardinal who founded the Villa is found throughout the grounds with the coat of arms of a crawfish with the obvious intent of auto-notoriety.
It was Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto, who between 1590 and 1600, continued the project and had the second palace, Montalto, erected using the same model as the first.
The internals were decorated between 1613 and 1615 by a group of painters under the guide of Giuseppe Cesari, nicknamed, the Cavalier of Arpino.
Among these painters, Prospero Orsi, was responsible for the painting of the grotesqueries, Agostino Tassi did the frescoes in trompe l'oeil in the vault of the loggia on the ground floor where aviaries are painted with a refined technique based on an illusionistic prospective, Nicolò Trombetta and the Cavalier of Arpino worked together in the conversation hall as well as another pupil Marzio Ganassini
Together the two palaces constituted the architectural backdrop to the Italian garden and take on a centralized geometry in a quadric module.
If the design of the garden was the opera of Vignola it is also true that the complicated fountain system which characterizes it, is the opera of Tommaso Ghinucci of Siena, expert in hydraulics who also worked on the Villa d'Estate in Tivoli. The water source falls from the Fontana del Diluvio into that of the Delfini, a sort of octagonal pyramid in volcanic rock, and from there into the Fontana della Catena, surmounted by a crawfish that allows the flow of the water along the spirals that run above a flight of steps; the scenic chain of water feeds the Fontana dei Giganti, called so for the two powerful statues in volcanic stone that represent the rivers Tiber and Arno, and then, through the fountain called Tavola del Cardinale, it arrives to the Fontana dei Lumini shaped like a small amphitheatre with over 70 spurts to finish its course in the Fontana dai Mori, focus point of the geometric Italian garden formed by sixteen squares; the four central ones are part of the fountain, while the twelve side ones present a design formed by, always green, flowerbeds that form an embroidered frame with a spectacular effect.

In 1656 the Duke of Ippolito Lante purchased the property of the Villa and changed the name to what it is today and in 1971 the Villa became property of the state.

How to get there: The town of Bagnaia is found 70 kilometers north of Rome, only 4 miles from Viterbo and 30 minutes from the Orte Autostrada A1 exit.
From Rome take the state highway SS2 Cassia up to the Viterbo turnoff and follow indications for Bagnaia.

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