Villa Borghese gardens

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Piazza di Siena, Villa Borghese gardens, Rome.

Villa Borghese: the 19th century "Temple of Aesculapius" built purely as a landscape feature, influenced by the lake at Stourhead, Wiltshire, England.

Villa Borghese is a large landscape garden in the naturalistic English manner in Rome, containing a number of buildings, museums (see Galleria Borghese) and attractions. It is the second largest public park in Rome (80 hectares or 148 acres) after that of the Villa Doria Pamphili.

1 History
2 Villas in the gardens
3 Trivia
4 Photograph gallery
5 External links

[edit] History

In 1605, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V and patron of Bernini, began turning this former vineyard into the most extensive gardens built in Rome since Antiquity. The vineyard's site is identified with the gardens of Lucullus, the most famous in the late Roman republic. In the 19th century much of the garden's former formality was remade as a landscape garden in the English taste (illustration, right). The Villa Borghese gardens were long informally open but were bought by the commune of Rome and given to the public in 1903. The large landscape park in the English taste contains several villas. The Spanish Steps lead up to this park, and there is another entrance at the Porte del Popolo by Piazza del Popolo. The Pincio (the Pincian Hill of ancient Rome), in the south part of the park, offers one of the greatest views over Rome.

[edit] Villas in the gardens

The gardens are named for the Villa Borghese Pinciana, which was designed by the architect Flaminio Ponzio, using sketches by Scipione Borghese. It now contains the Galleria Borghese. The garden Casino Borghese, built on a rise above the Villa by the architect Giovanni Vasanzio, was set up by Camillo Borghese to contain sculptures by Bernini from the Borghese collection including his David and his Daphne and by Antonio Canova (Paolina Borghese) and paintings by Titian, Raphael and Caravaggio.

The Villa Giulia was built in 1551 - 1555 as a summer residence for Pope Julius III, now containing the Etruscan Museum (Museo Etrusco).

Painting by Diego Velázquez

The Villa Medici houses the French Academy in Rome, and the Fortezzuola a Gothic garden structure that houses a collection memorializing the academic modern sculptor Pietro Canonica. In the 1650s, Diego Velázquez painted several depictions of this Villa's garden casino festively illuminated at night. Before electricity, such torchlit illuminations carried an excitement hard to conceive today.

Other villas scattered through the Villa Borghese gardens are remains of a world exposition in Rome in 1911.
- The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna located in its grounds has a collection of 19th and 20th century paintings emphasizing Italian artists.
- Architecturally the most notable of the 1911 exposition pavilions is the English pavilion designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens (who later designed New Delhi), now housing the British School at Rome.

[edit] Trivia

The villa's gardens feature in one of Respighi's Pini di Roma. Beside the 1911 Exposition's villas, there is the Exposition's Zoo, recently rearranged, with minimal caging, as the Bioparco, and the Zoological Museum (Museo di Zoologia).