THE SYMBOLIC GARDEN —
The First Garden
With its many layers of meanings, each water point is a reference to our history of garden architecture: from Romanity with the 1929 swimming pool, to the Baroque with the waterfall fountain, to the Renaissance in the Amphora Fountain, to the Metaphysical in the Nymphaeum that seems straight out of a de Chirico painting.
In 1920 architect Raffaele de Vico — a classicist and visionary who also restored Villa Borghese in Rome — created a Symbolic Garden on the eighteenth-century Botanical Garden, in continuity with the Renaissance tradition of Tuscia, see the Sacred Grove of Bomarzo created by Vicino Orsini in 1547.
If Bomarzo is a "Theatre of Memory, "Villa Lina is a "Temple to the Essence of Universal Knowledge" — a Metaphysical Temple. At the entrance stand two Egyptian columns (3,500 years old in pink granite from Assuan),rounded off in Roman times. Then the labyrinth where our personal Minotaur awaits us, and opposite the green wall, hedge that screens the centre of the initiatory path.
The garden as a body: to the right, the grotto — the receptive, intuitive, feminine principle, birth, water springing forth, the stream leading to the overflowing Cascade Fountain, 3 shells like those from which Botticelli's Venus is born.
The form: the DNA.
To the left, the rational, manifesting, masculine principle, in the Amphora Fountain enclosed by a circle of 8 cypress trees — like Stonehenge, a calendar marking the 8 key points of the transformative energy of the cycle. Only when these two energies dance finally in balance in the ellipse of the 12 solar months, at the centre: the 13th point ( like the 13 Moons ) only then does the Ouroboros serpent, transmit the garden’s secret message of total re-gene-ration.
WATER ELEMENTS IN THE SYMBOLIC GARDEN: ECHOES
The 1929 Olympic swimming pool is a citation of Romanity: the Canopus of Hadrian'sVilla.
While in the Canopus the space is defined by columns and sculptures, deVico — a true poet of Nature — defines the space with cypresses and tall cherry laurel hedges, thus creating this grand "green room."
The Waterfall Fountain is a citation of the Viterbese Baroque — see the Fontana della Catena at Villa Lante in Bagnaia. (Architect de Vico could not know that 3 decades later MassimoIgliori, the son of his committente, would marry Angela Lante Montefeltro della Rovere, mother of the present curator Paola Igliori thus linking the 2 gardens!). On a symbolic level, it embodies the receptive, intuitive, feminineprinciple: water springing between dimension from the womb like grotto fills and overflows the 3 shells, like our 3 bodies — physical, mental and spiritual. The shape: the DNA. Grottos and springs from immemorable time sacred to the Great Mother.