Museum visits · Bomarzo · Italy
The Sacred Grove of Bomarzo
the monsters a duke had carved into the boulders of his wood, and that nobody then looked at for three hundred years
In the wood below Bomarzo there are boulders of peperino, the kind the volcano left wherever it happened to. In the middle of the sixteenth century Pier Francesco Orsini, whom everyone called Vicino, brought in stonecutters and had them carve the boulders where they lay, without moving them: an ogre with a mouth wide enough to walk into standing up, an elephant crushing a Roman legionary, a dragon set upon by three dogs, a house built crooked on purpose. It is not a formal Italian garden and it is not really a garden at all: there is no symmetry, no perspective, the figures are not to any common scale and they come out from among the trees one at a time. For three hundred years nobody went back, and the wood took it over again. Then in the twentieth century it resurfaced, Salvador Dalí and Michelangelo Antonioni came, and ever since it has been the place everyone calls the Park of the Monsters.
Getting there
The wood is not up in the village: it lies on the floor of the valley, below Bomarzo, and you get there without climbing to the centre.
- You leave the Orte to Viterbo trunk road, the SS204 Ortana, and drop down towards the village: the signs for the park are there from a long way off, the brown ones used for heritage sites
- There are three car parks at the entrance, all free, and the first is at 42.491858, 12.247657: parking and overnight stays are allowed for motorhomes too. There is no service of any kind, no water, no waste drain, no electricity, but for a night the place is quiet and still
- The village of Bomarzo itself is up above, with narrow streets in the old centre: for the Sacred Grove there is no need to go up, and with a long vehicle it is better not to try
Practical information
Duration two hours to go round without hurrying, which is what the place asks for; an hour and a half walking without stopping, but the inscriptions are half the visit and you read them close up.
Price 15 euros, 9 euros from 4 to 13 years old
When to go all year, closed only on 25 December
Suitable for children more than adults, because it is the one museum where you climb on the statues. The route is earth and steps cut into the rock, going up and down the whole way: it is not ground for a pushchair or a wheelchair.
Booking not needed if you go on your own, tickets are sold at the gate or online. It is compulsory for groups of 30 and over, five days ahead.
Contacts
Where it is
Bomarzo · Lazio
Notes
- Opening hours as stated by the official website: open every day of the year, all day without a break, closed only on 25 December. March to September 9:00-19:00, October 9:00-18:00 on summer time and 9:00-17:00 on winter time, November to February 9:00-17:00. Last admission is an hour before closing, and it has to be counted in: two hours of visit means going in with time to spare
- The ticket is 15 euros, 9 from 4 to 13 years old, free under 4 and for anyone with a certified one hundred per cent disability. There is no reduction for adults
- Why the statues sit crooked. They were not carried there: they were already there. Vicino had the peperino boulders cropping out of the wood carved where they lay, one by one, and the route goes from boulder to boulder following the ground. It is the reason the figures have no common scale and do not all face the same way, and the reason the place resembles no other sixteenth century garden
- The inscriptions are half the wood. On the lip of the ogre, where you walk in and find a stone table inside, is carved "OGNI PENSIERO VOLA", every thought flies. On the leaning house, built crooked on a tilted boulder and inside which you lose your balance, is carved "ANIMUS QUIESCENDO FIT PRUDENTIOR ERGO", the mind at rest grows wiser. At the Etruscan bench the invitation is in verse: "Voi che pel mondo gite errando vaghi di veder maraviglie alte et stupende, venite qua dove son faccie horrende, elefanti, leoni, orsi, orchi et draghi", you who wander the world eager to see high and astonishing marvels, come here where there are dreadful faces, elephants, lions, bears, ogres and dragons. Nobody knows for certain what order they should be read in, and that is part of the game
- What you meet, more or less in order: the two sphinxes at the entrance, the great mask of Proteus with the globe on his head, the mausoleum, Hercules tearing Cacus apart, the tortoise with Victory on its shell and the whale, Pegasus, the nymphaeum with the three Graces, the theatre, the leaning house, the square of the vases, the sleeping nymph, Ceres, the elephant with the tower and the legionary in its trunk, the dragon, the ogre, the Etruscan bench, Proserpina, the square of the pine cones, Echidna and the lions, and at the top the little temple
- The Etruscan thread, which is the thread of this trip. The mausoleum is carved in the shape of an Etruscan tomb and the bench has always been called Etruscan: Vicino Orsini had the real tombs in his own woods, cut into the same peperino, and he put them in his garden. In the same stone that at Civita Castellana becomes the Faliscan necropolises cut into the walls of the gorges, here a sixteenth century lord carves monsters. It is a jump of two thousand years made on the same material, and it is why this half day sits well inside a trip about the peoples who came before Rome, even though the wood has nothing to do with them
- The three hundred years of darkness. When the last of the Orsini died the wood was left to itself and stayed that way until the nineteen fifties. In 1954 Giancarlo and Tina Severi Bettini bought it, reopened it and spent the rest of their lives restoring it: the plaque that remembers them is inside the little temple, which is the last thing you come to
- Dalí and Antonioni. Salvador Dalí came in 1948, had himself photographed posing among the statues and called it a unique historical invention; Michelangelo Antonioni shot a documentary there in 1950, "La villa dei mostri". These are the two moments that put Bomarzo back on the map, and they explain why a Mannerist garden gets talked about as a surrealist place
- The ceramic women among the trees. Among the stone monsters you come across a group of Nanas by Niki de Saint Phalle, lying on a blue disc. They do not jar: Bomarzo is one of the places her Tarot Garden at Capalbio came from, along with Gaudí's Park Güell, and the park has hosted them at least since the "In Arte Vicino" festival in the summer of 2023, the one for the five hundred years of Vicino Orsini. Whether those works have stayed or come and go is not stated anywhere.
- The Etruscan pyramid, which is elsewhere and has nothing to do with the ticket. It is a block of peperino some fifteen metres high, with steps and channels cut into it up to a platform at the top, and it is also called the preacher's stone: an altar, almost certainly. You reach it on foot in half an hour from the sports ground at Bomarzo, the path is free and poorly waymarked. It is a separate half day, not an addition to this one.
