Sculpture in Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, Italy. Photo by Renée DeVoe Mertz
Parco dei Mostri (Park of the Monsters, also known as the Sacred Wood or Villa of Marvels), located on the outskirts of the town of Bomarzo, is a 16th century Italian garden unlike other 16th century Italian gardens. Prince Vicino Orsini and architect Pirro Ligorio seem to have designed the park in opposition to the coherent, open, and geometric plans of the period, swapping legible rationality for enigmatic surreality. The wood is filled with monstrous, mythological, or otherwise eccentric sculptures and buildings based on obscure iconography and arranged with little to no logical relationship to each other.
In fairness, the Sacred Wood probably has more in common with the park-like grounds that often surrounded a villa’s formal gardens, presenting a kind of cultivated wildness that contrasted with the inner gardens’ orderliness. Now, however, Parco dei Mostri sits alone, devoid of this other context, yet still filled with evidence of an originating care and investment that was typically reserved for more central spaces.
Despite being neglected for centuries after the deaths of its creators, the park eventually re-entered the cultural imagination in the 19th and 20th centuries through people like Goethe and Salvador Dalí, and now draws tourists from around the world.
Life-size-ish sculpture in Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, Italy. Photo by Renée DeVoe Mertz
Larger-than-life-size sculptures in Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, Italy. Photo by Renée DeVoe Mertz
Sculpture in Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, Italy. Photo by Renée DeVoe Mertz
Sculpture in Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, Italy. Photo by Renée DeVoe Mertz