TEXTO DE LOS SUBTITULOS
This man was Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, and his garden
harnessed water and made it dance and perform like no other before since.
I’ve been to Villa d’Este a few times before.
You come in from the top but originally, it was
designed to arrive at the bottom of the garden, and then the visitor would
slowly climb us this hill, amazed at all the wonders they seeing and thoroughly
puffed by the time they reached the top.
And that’s how it was originally designed, so that it
would unfold and reveal itself and, by the time you reached the top, which is
where the cardinal would have been, you were in a state of breathless awe.
Cardinal d’Este had vast wealth, and an overwhelming
desire to became pope.
When he failed in his first attempt in 1.549, he hired Rome’s most distinguished architect,
Pirro Ligorio, to create the biggest and most ambitious water garden since
Hadrian’s villa.
Ligorio demolished whole streets to make room for the
garden on the steep hillside, and built a sophisticated system to bring water
from a nearby aqueduct.
In today’s money, all this would cost a cool 100
million pounds.
But this wasn’t just a matter of d’Este displaying his
wealth and artistic taste, although it was certainly that.
He also intended to impress visitors with the depth of
his scientific knowledge.
And these were truly astonishing feats of
hydro-engineering.
The scale of the water is just ridiculous, really.
Miles over the top, but what d’Este did was re-channel
the water supplying the town, and took a third of it – a third of the town’s
water supply – to make his garden, so having done that, then he was determined
to do something big whit it, so he had an enormous hydro-technical display and
it still remains the most impressive I’ve ever seen, and it all comes from one
source, and there’s no pumps at all.
The whole thing is powered by pressure, so knew what
they were up to.
By studying Villa Adriana, Renaissance architects
re-discovered ways of taming water that had been lost for a thousand years.
They found they could control the water’s speed and
movement using different size pipes and spouts and, with this new knowledge,
the artistic ambition of gardens rose to new astonishing creative heights.
This is the Terrace of 100 Fountains. Took five years
to make. It uses water that comes from a single source, no pump, all the fountains
have the same velocity, the same rhythm, the same sound, and it builds up as we
walk along.
It’s like a musical instrument.
Now, poor old Cardinal d’Este, he hardly saw this.
It took five years at the end of his life and then was
completed, and behind this beauty is a nagging pain for him, because the three
layers of water represent rivers leading to Rome, and of course, that’s where d’Este
wasn’t, and that’s where d’Este most of all wanted to be.
In the two decades it took to construct his garden,
Cardinal d’Este made five failed bids for the papal throne.
At every setback, his garden got grander and grander,
and the coded messages it sent out became ever more pointed.
The waters of the 100 Fountains flow down here to a
garden called Rometta and the story behind it is that the Pope forbade Cardinal
d’Este to build a palace in Rome, because he knew that he would challenge his
power, so d’Este petulantly said,
“Ok, I cant’ have my palace in Rome, I’ll have Rome in
my palace”
And so he built a model of Rome. Rometta was originally more than twice its current
sice, but most of it was demolished in the 19th century.
