Sacro Bosco (Parco dei Mostri)

Pier Francesco Orsini, known as Vicino, was born on July 4, 1523, in Rome according to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, and in Bomarzo according to the town's own history page. In 1542, a family dispute over his father's estate was settled by the arbitration of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and Vicino received Bomarzo, a hill town in northern Lazio. He married Giulia Farnese, a great-grandniece of Pope Paul III, on January 11, 1545, by the Dizionario's account. The Comune gives the same day in 1544.

He spent about a dozen years as a soldier. On July 17, 1553, imperial troops captured him at Hesdin, and he was held in Flanders until 1555. He then fought for Pope Paul IV against Spain. Giulia died in 1560, leaving five sons and two daughters. One of the sons, Orazio, later died at Lepanto in command of a galley.

The little wood

Below the family palace, in a valley of peperino boulders, Orsini had the rock carved where it lay. One of two stone posts in front of a small theater carries his name and the year MDLII, 1552. The other reads "sol per sfogar il core," only to give vent to the heart. Finestre sull'Arte links the phrase to a line in Petrarch's Canzoniere.

In his letters, Orsini called the place the Boschetto. The Dizionario says the name was later "improperly promoted" to Sacro Bosco, sacred wood, on a wave of supposed esoteric meanings. The same entry dates the park to 1552 and calls it a remembrance of his wife, who was alive for another 8 years. Finestre sull'Arte says the garden was begun while Giulia lived and finished and rededicated after her death. Archaeology magazine reported in 2025 that much of it was completed after 1560, which has led some scholars to read it as a work of grief.

The garden's last stop is a small domed temple on high ground. The Italian garden association APGI describes it as a mausoleum for Giulia, with Farnese lilies set beside Orsini roses in the vault of its porch, and suggests the terraces below may have held the family and their subjects at anniversary masses for her. The park's own events page calls it the Tempio del Vignola.

Orsini's later letters, written from Bomarzo between 1573 and 1583 to Jean Drouet, a Savoyard cleric and doctor living in Rome, praise a life withdrawn from wealth and power. Rome and the papal court stand in them for hypocrisy. The Dizionario calls the Boschetto a sign of his "Epicurean spirit," a place for the pleasures of the body and for contemplation.

The inscriptions

Two sphinxes guard the entrance, and their bases are lettered in red. The left one reads "CHI CON CIGLIA INARCATE ET LABBRA STRETTE NON VA PER QUESTO LOCO MANCO AMMIRA LE FAMOSE DEL MONDO MOLI SETTE," whoever does not walk through this place with raised brows and tight lips will not admire the seven famous wonders of the world either. The right one reads "TU CH'ENTRI QUA PON MENTE PARTE A PARTE ET DIMMI POI SE TANTE MARAVIGLIE SIEN FATTE PER INGANNO O PUR PER ARTE," you who enter here, take note piece by piece, and tell me then whether so many marvels are made to deceive or for art. The Dizionario reads that second sphinx as evidence that Orsini meant the meaning of his wood to stay ambiguous.

A bench set in a stone niche carries the invitation the Dizionario quotes as "Voi che pel mondo gite errando vaghi / di veder meraviglie alte et stupende / venite qua dove son faccie horrende / elefanti leoni orsi orche et draghi." It translates as: you who wander the world, eager to see high and astonishing marvels, come here, where there are horrible faces, elephants, lions, bears, ogres, and dragons. Other transcriptions end the list with "orchi" instead of "orche."

Beside two wrestling giants, usually identified as Hercules and Cacus, a verse compares them with the Colossus of Rhodes: "Se Rodi altier già fu del suo colosso / pur di quest'il mio bosco ancho si gloria / e per più non poter fo quant'io posso." If Rhodes was once proud of its colossus, my wood glories in this one too, and since I can do no more, I do what I can.

The leaning house is built on a tilted boulder, and walking into it throws visitors off balance. APGI transcribes a dedication on it to Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo, bishop of Trent, who probably interceded for Orsini's release from the Flanders prisons. A second line reads "ANIMUS QUIESCENDO FIT PRUDENTIOR ERGO," the mind, by resting, becomes wiser.

The ogre, the Orco, is a head carved from the rock, with a staircase up into its mouth and a stone table inside. "OGNI PENSIERO VOLA," every thought flies, runs around its lip. Archaeology magazine reported that a drawing made by Giovanni Guerra in 1604 shows a longer text, "Lasciate ogni pensiero voi ch'entrate," abandon all thought, you who enter, a play on the sign over the gate of Hell in Dante's Inferno. Some of the letters there now are painted on, likely in the mid-20th century.

What it means

Rome Art Lover places the monsters in the chivalric poems of Boiardo and Ariosto. Finestre sull'Arte points to Bernardo Tasso's Amadigi. APGI allows that the figures may be the stages of an alchemical itinerary. The elephant, which carries a tower on its back and lifts a soldier in its trunk, has been read as Hannibal's war elephant and as a memorial to Orazio at Lepanto. The park's own history calls the wood "a hermeneutic labyrinth of silences, allusions, and illusions."

"The experience of the Sacro Bosco is more like flipping between the pages of a whole range of texts that don't necessarily cohere into a single linear narrative," the art historian Luke Morgan of Monash University told Archaeology. John Garton of Clark University, whose team has been scanning the sculptures, said: "One of the maddening things about working on the Sacro Bosco is how little historic written evidence there is."

Who made it

The park's printed map states that Orsini designed it and that the Neapolitan architect Pirro Ligorio built it in 1552. VisitLazio, the regional tourism portal, also credits Ligorio. Finestre sull'Arte calls him the most probable name and dates his work from 1560, citing two letters of 1564 by Annibal Caro that describe new works under way. APGI, drawing on the proceedings of a 2007 conference at Bomarzo, says recent studies give the design instead to Raffaello da Montelupo, who left the stonecutters to Francesco Moschino and then to Moschino's son Simone, the author of much of the sculpture. The Comune records Francesco Moschino at Bomarzo only in 1552, and Simone with a team of Florentine stonecutters much later. The Dizionario names no designer at all. In 1948, a newsreel narrator credited the leaning house to "the fantasy of Vignola." None of these accounts cites a contract or letter that places Ligorio at Bomarzo.

Shepherds and surrealists

Orsini died at Bomarzo on January 28, 1585, by the Dizionario's account. Rome Art Lover gives 1583. In 1645, his heirs sold Bomarzo to Ippolito Lante della Rovere. Rome Art Lover writes that the wood was left to shepherds, who sheltered in its carved caves.

On November 10, 1948, the newsreel La Settimana Incom showed Salvador Dalí in the wood. The Istituto Luce catalog describes him entering the temple with a cat in his arms, sitting inside the open mouth, and climbing beside the head of a statue to point toward a lens out of frame. The Dizionario says Dalí first visited in 1938, and Finestre sull'Arte says he shot a short film there that year. Archaeology gives 1948 for his visit. Edmund Wilson, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1972, said the critic Mario Praz had lived in Rome most of his life and never heard of the place until a Russian painter told him, who had heard of it from an American. Dalí, a friend of that painter, "took possession," Wilson wrote, with "a procession of motor cars and a retinue that suggested the making of a film." Michelangelo Antonioni made a documentary there, dated 1949 by the Dizionario and 1950 elsewhere. The park's leaflet also lists Claude Lorrain and Goethe among its rediscoverers, with no date or source for either.

The Bettini family bought the wood in the 1950s. Rome Art Lover gives 1954, and the park's Italian leaflet dates the restoration from 1960. Giovanni Bettini published a guide to the park in 1991. Rome Art Lover notes that, with no plans to work from, some smaller statues may not stand where Orsini put them.

The Argentine writer Manuel Mujica Láinez published a novel, Bomarzo, in 1962, and turned it into a libretto for Alberto Ginastera's opera, staged in Washington in 1967. The park is still private, run by Bosco Sacro di Bomarzo SRL, and its leaflet names the Bettini family as owners.

The park opens every day except December 25, with no midday break. Hours in 2026 are 9am to 7pm from March, once Italy has moved to daylight saving time, through September; 9am to 6pm in October until the clocks change on October 25, then 9am to 5pm through February. Last entry is 1 hour before closing.

Tickets cost €15 for adults and €9 for ages 4 to 13 in October 2026, up from €13 and €8 in July 2025. Visitors with a certified 100% disability enter free. Tickets are sold at the gate for cash or card, or online in timed slots, where the price includes a presale fee. Guided tours cost extra and are booked by email through the park. On some summer evenings the park opens late with the sculptures lit, and tickets for those nights are sold only online.

The paths run up and down stone stairs, and the park says only about 10% of the monumental area can be visited by people with limited mobility. Its rules ask visitors not to climb on the sculptures, the map asks them to stay about 3 meters (10 feet) back, and tripods and drones are not allowed. Commercial photography needs written permission. Eating is not allowed in the monumental area, but there is a picnic area with tables and barbecues, a bar, and a restaurant, La Locanda del Mostro, which needs an entry ticket at lunch and also serves dinner and pizza on Fridays and Saturdays. Dogs other than guide dogs stay outside in free kennels at the entrance; the ticket desk lends a padlock and a water bowl.

Bomarzo is about 65 miles (105 km) by road north of Rome and about 2.5 miles (4 km) from the Attigliano exit of the A1. Without a car, the nearest station is Orte Scalo, with Cotral buses toward Bomarzo.