Villa Lante di Bagnaia

VISITING VILLA LANTE DI BAGNAIA AND ITS SURROUNDINGS

Discover the charm of the Italian gardens and the delightful village of Bagnaia, a hamlet of Viterbo.

The tour can be tailored to your group’s needs.

DINING IN BAGNAIA

Our group proposal for a lunch or tasting in the Bagnaia area: a typical restaurant within the hamlet, ideal for a meal before or after an excursion to Bagnaia and its surroundings. Alternatively, a country restaurant just a stone’s throw from Bagnaia, in the Monti Cimini area.

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VILLA LANTE DI BAGNAIA

Villa Lante is one of the greatest achievements of the Italian sixteenth century.

The villa’s history begins when Cardinal Raffaele Riario and his nephew Ottaviano decided to enclose a large piece of land at the foot of the Cimini hills and turn it into a hunting park. Later, around the mid-sixteenth century, thanks to the vision of Cardinal Francesco de Gambara, the actual construction began — mainly fountains, cascades, hedges, water features, niches and labyrinths, whose design is attributed to Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola. One of the most distinctive aspects of the project is precisely the absence of a true villa: there are only two twin buildings on the same side, open on the ground floor and each featuring loggias with three great arches, frescoed by Raffaellino da Reggio and Agostino Tassi. It is therefore the garden that is at the heart of the design, and in particular the element of water, gushing from numerous fountains, enriched with charming sculptural groups and arranged along five levels of overlapping terraces. Of incredible impact is the fountain formed by a triple ring of basins: the so-called Fountain of the Square, topped by a sculptural group attributed to Taddeo Landini depicting Four Moors. Gambara also celebrated his lineage by commissioning a “chain” fountain, whose elements recall the shape of a river crayfish.