Bomarzo

Bomarzo sits on a lava spur of the Monti Cimini, fifteen kilometers east of Viterbo, on the wooded edge of the Tuscia. The town itself is small and medieval, dominated by the Palazzo Orsini above it. The reason to come is in the wooded valley below: the Sacro Bosco, also called the Parco dei Mostri, a Mannerist sculpture garden commissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini, called Vicino, between 1547 and his death in 1588.

The design is attributed to Pirro Ligorio and the sculptures to Simone Moschino. Vicino built it after the death of his wife Giulia Farnese, and the inscriptions across the rocks make clear that the garden was meant to astonish rather than please: a leaning house, a giant tearing a man in two, an ogre's mouth carved into the bedrock with a stone bench inside it as a tongue. The garden was abandoned for centuries; Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau visited in the 20th century. The Bettini family restored it in the 1950s.