In the Lazio region of Italy, between Viterbo and Orte, there is an Etruscan road that runs through the valley of Bomarzo. Originally a place of worship of the Great Goddess, it was occupied during the Bronze Age by a patriarchal culture that adapted its sanctuaries to the cult of its masculine deities. By the 7th century BC, after Rome assumed the leadership of the Latin League, the Valley began to be a place devoted to Mars, which gives it its current name: Polimartium (Polimarzo and later Bomarzo), City of Mars. Thus, the acropolis of the place, located on one of the peaks of the valley, belonged to the god of war, while “everything related to the secrets of fertility and death took place down in the valley. The demons remained close to the earth, under the shade of the trees and in the grottos that led to the underworld.”1 It was with good reason that the Romans referred to the oak and elm forest that covered the valley with the name sacer—simultaneously sacred and profane—a topographic threshold that has remained as such until today (0.12).
It is understandable that a place associated with the ancient goddesses of the Earth and other chthonic powers was considered either enchanted or accursed during the Middle Ages, until Pier Francesco Orsini (1523-1583), Duke of Bomarzo, decided to build a rather strange park in the valley. The gardens of Bomarzo, also known as the parco dei mostri (Park of the Monsters) or the sacro bosco (sacred forest), follow an intricate terraced design populated by a grotesque and cryptic set of sculptures which more than to please, aim to awe and unsettle the visitor. The meaning and configuration of the sculptures and of the park itself remains a mystery. According to some specialists they were inspired by Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, although it is more likely that the inspiration was the novel Floridante, by his father Bernardo, who was close friend of the Duke. Other specialists find references to Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. However, none of these literary works gives a full account of the surreal quality and the allegorical meaning of Bomarzo’s sculptures and the journey they propose. The park itself is the heir to a much bigger tradition that goes back to ancient Rome “in the shape of sacred forests or Elysium fields, designed as landscaping works with fountains and sculptures [which] suggested a relation between nature, the gods and the world of men.”2 In few words, a tradition that made use of the basic elements of the locus amoenus.
A brief inventory of the park’s sculptures, which was originally accessed by the deep end of the valley: at the entrance, at each side of the path, we find a gigantic turtle that carries on its shell a woman who seems to be playing a trumpet (a fame) and an enormous head with open jaws (an Orcus). These two sculptures seem to offer a choice, an ascending path which takes to a higher level (anabasis), and descending one, though the Orcus’ mouth, which leads to the underworld (katabasis). Ahead on the first path there is the fountain of Pegasus, symbol of poetic inspiration, which invited the visitors to drink from its waters, so that they entered a world of imagination. Through a stretch of forest there are a couple of grottos inhabited by nymphs from where one can ascend a staircase to an inclined house, after which began a new level populated by giants. A dragon attacked by two lions, two titans fighting to death, an elephant that carries a trampled legionnaire with his trunk. As we ascend, the sculptures become more gargantuan and the scenes more primitive and grotesque. The disturbing quality of these figures and the elements of the ensemble (water and fountains, abundant shade) form a perfect locus ambiguus in which we can appreciate the interpenetration between pleasant and terrible which characterizes our paradeisos (0.24, 0.27).
On the other hand, the gardens of Bomarzo possess an unmistakable labyrinthine quality (0.5, 0.7, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 3.3, 4.9), expressed not in a concentric geometric structure but in the fact that
it is not possible, from any point within the park, to get a single view of the whole ensemble: Each level represents a new phase of the process, a new state of things.3
The Sacro Bosco of Bomarzo is designed as an ascending (and potentially descending) journey along an allegorical spiral, the same figure that traces the passage from Purgatory to earthly paradise in the Divine Comedy (6.5). Thus, it is not at all gratuitous the appearance of an entrance to the underworld in the gardens, implicit since antiquity in the rites of fertility and death that took place in the bottom of the valley.
Framing the Orcus’ jaws we find an inscription engraved on the rock: ogni pensiero vola (all thoughts fly) an invitation to be carried away by the power of imagination. According to a rumor, the worn-out threshold originally said lasciate ogni pensiero voi ch’entrate (leave all thoughts behind, ye who enter), a clear echo of the legend that Dante put at the entrance of the Inferno, lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate, “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!” (0.6).
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