If I haven’t made a big enough deal about it in my previous
entry – Rome makes a package on people who love ruins. And it’s not just in
Rome, there are day trips to places outside Rome to see the ancient ruins.
Tiovoli is one of them and of course there’s course Pompeii. But I’ll get to
Pompeii in another entry.
For those of you who
have been following my journey, you will probably remember that I visited
Hadrian’s wall up in Newcastle in England. So when I saw a day trip to
Hadrian’s Villa, I was naturally inclined to see where this famous person lived
in Italy. Of course it’s all ruins now, but unlike Newcastle, they haven’t
reconstructed the villa for tourists they have the ruins of his actual villa.
(NB they are reconstructing parts of the village, but it’s in Italian time so
as our guide said ‘they work five minutes a day’).
I suppose reconstructing the Villa is better than leaving
the few remaining artefacts found on the site to the mercy of the elements. A
lot of the artefacts are now safely stored in the vaults of the Vatican Museums
and sometimes if you’re lucky they actually put them on display. (See what I mean,
if I had known about what was actually held at the Vatican Museum before I went
to visit it?)
The villa itself (which is really the size of a village with
its at least seven palaces, Roman Baths, a library, at least one massive
kitchen and dining room and a fish pond) is a bit like the Colosseum because it
was left to the mercy of the Italian concept of recycling. In other words a lot
of the marble and other precious materials are no longer in the ruins, but can
be found in other structures. Another similarity the villa has to the Colosseum
is that they both took 10 years to build. 10 years to build a village v one
building. It’s amazing what people can do when they put their mind to
something!
After visiting palaces and grand houses in the UK, the Ville
D’Este’s bare rooms aren’t very impressive. While the design of the house and
the frescos are quite good proportions (sometimes overdone), the views of the
garden are incredible! I’ve never seen a garden with so many water features and
all designed onto a steep hill too. Not good for people with bad knees or
wheelchairs to wander around, but view from the house is just as impressive as
hiking through the garden. There’s even an organ that opens in the middle of a
statue and plays every hour or so (as opposed to a clock). No doubt the
materials have been recycled from Hadrian’s Villa.
