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Different kinds of gardens in ancient times

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Gardens everywhere and in any form

Gardens everywhere and in any form

In ancient Rome many were the great suburban residences and many were their gardens. All around Italy we find their imposing ruins. At Capri we stumble on what is left of the pleasant Damecuta residence, while the much more striking, and very dramatic Villa Iovis, the last Tiberius’ residence, is perched on the rocks of the island’s extreme southern part. Here, substituting the real garden which for water limitation could not be implanted, an impressive portico offered brisk walks and pleasant open air life. One could stroll in it looking at the gorgeous panorama of Sorrento coast and walk peacefully until, at the end, the porch was abruptly cut by what is now called “il salto di Tiberio”, a steep abyss falling in the blue Capri’s sea..
Later on Nero created his refuge in the thickets and the forests of the savage Subiaco landscape, while Massenzio chose the interior of Sicily for his Piazza Armerina’s hunting palace, a dream of beauty all glittering of richly coloured mosaics floors, a residence which certainly must have had gardens all around it. but for the moment they have not been found.
However all around Italy there were many imperial villas and each one had its extensive park. Among the most beautiful there was Villa Albana, a splendid residence with noteworthy gardens. Then there was Nero who kept a splendid park and erected the famous Domus Aurea in Rome’s centre subtracting a great extent of building area to Romans, an act which led to the subsequent uprising, Domitian thought that if he wanted a similar and pleasurable residence it would be safer to create it out of Rome, and then did it in a convenient place not very far from the town. His residence occupied a large area starting from the lake now called Castel Gandolfo and ending at the Appian way on the other side of the hill.
On the lake side Villa Albana didn’t have a real garden because the flanks of the hill were very steep and ruined down in the ancient crater. One could only go down to the lake’s shore and this was done by two roads which crossed the wooded area, but to grow a garden on the hill’s side would have been impossible. It was then necessary to create a substitute for it, one of this open air places with a nice landscaping where people could take a walk or rest. Thus for all the kilometre and a half of the lake’s shore between the republican Doric Nymphaeum and the Flavian Bergantino grotto arrangement, jetties and landing places were built. One kilometre and a half; an extension which could have been justified only by the existence of an important harbour in full activity and not by a pier where only a few elegant boats would be moored and from time to time used by the emperor and some close friends. It was evident that all these arrangements of jetties, landing places and even a light house were clearly decorative ones, ornamental elements set there to replace the missing garden and offer to Domitian and his friends the walks which Romans enjoyed in their parks.
As we have just seen the lake side was a beautiful place, but the imperial palace was not built there. It was on the other side of the hill looking toward the sea and dominating all its western gardens which were set on four terraces. Really the first and the higher one of those terraces was not a garden but only an esplanade where the great cisterns necessary to have all the fountains working had been built.
The second terrace, which was set between the palace first floor and a very elegant small court theatre, was, maybe, the principal garden. Open as it was on the western side it could even see the blue of the sea shining far away at the horizon. On the east, the overhanging hill side was contained by a high wall decorated by 4 Nymphaea. Near the Palace entry a gallery cut in the tufa arrived at the hill’s other side and reached a pavilion that overlooked the lake and at which feet started the roads to its shore.
The third terrace, a simpler garden, was the arrival of two access roads. Its esplanade extended itself in front of a very ample cryptoportico which, cut in the flank of the hill, served as an entrance hall to the palace. A monumental stairway, set at its western end, climbed to the imperial residence first floor.
Lastly there was the fourth terrace. Here the hill side containing wall was constituted by a series of boxes which Lugli defined as stables. Nearby there was an enclosure shaped like a stadium; only it was not a stadium but a special form of garden, a kind that was in the fashion at the times.
Thus in the Villa Albana we have found not only normal gardens but also two special forms of them: first we have seen how the lake’s shores had been exploited to create walks and resting places as in normal gardens, then, after this, we have found the stadium garden a special form of planning. Both were used in Romans’ villas: we find many examples of them in the ruins of some important residence, and in the frescoes which adorn the walls of ancient Roman residences we see them as they were with their decorative jetties built in front of a maritime or a lake side villas
Another very fine example of arrangement of the shores is found in the excavations of the Val Catena’s Villa , set on the island of Brioni in the northern part of the Adriatic, the pavilions of which where set around an entire bay. This maritime villa also had traditional gardens, but its principal landscaping feature were the arrangements of the jetties that coasted the little bay They were purely decorative ones and flanked as they were by porticoes, baths, temples and pavilions, created pleasurable locations for open air life.
Another kind of arrangement of the sea side of a maritime residence that, set in a desertic area, didn’t have many possibilities of growing a proper garden, is found in one of the Silin’s villas I have studied: to wit the Maritime Odeon one. Here instead of jetties along the coast, the owners cut a long flight of steps in the rocky promontory’s limestone. In the center of them there was a small theatre turned to the north and the open sea,. On the back of this theatre the front of the villa displayed one of those perspective tricks that were very in fashion at the times. To obtain it in the direction of the centre of the façade the “intercolumnia” of the front portico became longer, and their height grew in the same direction. All those small arrangements gave to anyone coming from the sea the impression that the villa had a monumental curved portico.
As for the gardens like stadiums and other sports enclosures, there were a certain numbers of them. Lets start from Domitian who, apart of the Stadium of his Villa Albana had another one at the Domus Flavia on the Palatinus, a garden which began by a simple enclosure shaped like a stadium and decorated by some exedras, and was afterward enriched by a great portico and two semicircular fountains set at the garden extremities. Still in ruins as it is today it appears very monumental.
Gardens always of this kind, existed in other known residences. Thus in his Tuscany villa (EpistolarioV. 6) Pliny the Younger had a garden in the shape of a hippodrome. It was surrounded by a row of planes set along its enclosure and tied together by branches of ivy. At its centre there was a “stibadium”, a semicircular tricliniar couch set on the margin of a basin. Here the water functioned as a “mensa”, an arrangement that I have called a water triclinium. Pliny is the first to describe one of this arrangement and tell us how it worked. Thus we know that the servants stood in front of the basin, cut the food in appropriate pieces and put it to float on the water in container shaped as a birds and boats.
This very popular fashion of garden shaped as sport places extended itself also in other parts of the empire and we can find one of them in far away Africa and exactly in one of the Silin’s villa, the Little Circus’ one, a residence set on a rocky promontory that had a 300 m façade now ruined into the sea. The garden in question, set between the baths and a tricliniar tower on the top floor of which people dined, had the shape of a little circus. In its centre there was a long flower bed shaped as a “spina” with two semicircular basins at its ends. A third basin, set in the flower bed, divided it in two irregular parts in such a manner that whoever looked at it from the high floor of the tricliniar tower would see the garden much longer than it really was.
Those perspective tricks were in great fashion and we have seen them in the façade of the Maritime Odeon Villa and in the Little Circus’ garden. Another one of this kind is in Pompeii, where in front of the water biclinium of the house of Loreius Tiburtinu a small bridge cuts the euripus in two different parts and all is studied in such a way that, from the tricliniar couches, people would see the euripus and all the terrace much longer and imposing.
Thus we can see how in the roman world, in addition to the normal forms as the peristyle gardens or the terraced ones, there were other ones and very original too and they complete the history of Roman gardening and landscaping art.



Bibliography

Scintific popularization
From an Archeo's dossier
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Dossier: I giardini nell'antichità in Archeo nº 69, November, pp. 50-97

Sientific papers on gardens
- W. F. JASHEMSKI ed E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, I giardini di Villa Adriana: rapporto preliminare , in Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia di Archeologia, Vol. LX., 1987-88, pp. 145-169
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Il sistema di irrigazione della Piazza d'Oro in Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia di Archeologia,, LXII 1989-1990, pp 121-150
- W. F. JASHEMSKI ed E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI,, Preliminary excavations in the gardens of Hadrian's Villa: The Canopus and the Piazza d'Oro in Ameican Journal of Archaeology 96 , 1992, pp. 121-157
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – Ricerca archeologica ed analisi dei terreni: il caso di Villa Adriana in Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia di Archeologia, LXVII, 1994-1995 pp. 69.85; figg. 1-7.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Adriano: architettura del verde e dell’acqua in Horti Romani, Rome , 1995, pp. 363-399.
- J. E. FOSS e E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Lead Pipes Use in Ancient Roman Irrigation System and Content of Pb in the Soil of Archaeological Sites in Bullettin of the Metal Museum, Vol. 26 (1996-II) pp. 37-47.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI I giardini delle tombe e quello di Antinoo a Villa Adriana in Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia di Archeologia,, vol. LXXVI 2003-2004, pp. 231-261, figg. 1-21.