The Vatican gardens & Piranesi’s Secret Domain

St. Peter’s Basilica is at the pulsing heart of Rome, its soaring dome dominating the skyline of the ancient city. You are embraced first by the welcoming arms of Bernini’s baroque colonnade, then enfolded in the magnificent church itself. But behind this façade is a world few know and still fewer can enter. Here, set into a maze of buildings, are the offices and institutions of the Roman Catholic Church. And behind them lies an astonishing place of peace and respite, the Vatican gardens. Among the world’s important gardens, the Vatican’s are unique. They lack both the formal unity of those at Versailles and the ordered vision of nature that distinguishes the great eighteenth-century gardens of England. The Vatican gardens are complicated and intricate –as complex as the papacy itself. The plan they follow is not a true plan but the reflection of the Vatican’s long history of pragmatism.

one of many unexpected delights,
a mosaic niche in an old building

Near the Vatican radio station, just a few minute’s walk away, is a nice, homey touch; raised vegetable beds, fertilized organically. This small garden supplies the papal table, direct.

The great dome of St. Peter’s can be seen from nearly every point in the gardens, including the papal veggie patch.

At the foot of the bosco, shaded by pines, is the Villa Pia. Known also as the Casina of Pius IV, it’s the first example of an Italian garden house, a type of retreat that would proliferate through Europe.

the courtyard of the Casina (built 1558-62) of Pius IV

There are gardens within gardens; long vistas that run into ancient buildings; fountains that appear, like God’s grace, in the unlikeliest places. The feeling here is of serenity. In antiquity, this was the site of Nero’s summer villa and gardens, well placed to catch every cooling breeze.

The Italian Garden,
the last classic Renaissance “room” in the Vatican gardens.

Water was not always plentiful. In the Middle Ages, drought prevailed. The Renaissance pope Paul V reactivated an ancient Roman Aqueduct, Aqua Paola, to bring water to the Vatican. This water still feeds all the fountains. Propelled by gravity, descending from fountain to fountain, the water ends up in the twin fountains in St. Peter’s Square before flowing into the Tiber.

Twenty gardeners mind the
sixty-five-acre park

It is easy to imagine the gold and red papal carriage rolling down the secluded allees to an outdoor meeting.

The great gardens, with all their nooks and crannies, tend to be empty these days-though his Holiness walks in the park for exercise when his busy schedule permits. The stillness, while slightly surreal, lends the gardens an air of immanence. One is conscious, too, of history, of foibles, of the constant decisions and revisions that in the end seem not compromises but the very definition of human wisdom.

Since the second century B.C. gardens have flourished on the slopes of the Seven Hills of Rome.
With the advent of aqueducts, the peculiarly Roman mixture of plants, water, and perspective evolved into a distinctive art that harmoniously integrated villas with the surrounding landscape. The structure these gardens acquired in antiquity and in the Renaissance changed little until the nineteenth century, when the fashion for English informality swept away many a formal design. One survivor is the jewel of a garden on the Aventine surrounded by structures that Piranesi designed in the 1760’s for the Knight of Malta.

Properly called Knights of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta belong to a Roman Catholic order of laymen and monks that still enjoy nearly complete sovereignty. Like the Vatican, the order has extraterritorial rights, its own passports, and courts of law. Initially the Knights maintained an eleventh-century pilgrims’ hospital in the Holy Land, but after the Crusades the order retreated to Cyprus, then conquered Rhodes and eventually was given Malta, which Napoleon seized in 1798. Today rich and influential, they provide funds for hospitals and the needy throughout the world from their headquarters in Rome.





many tourists know the entrance to the Knights’ garden
because of its singular view through the keyhole to Saint Peter’s
one and three- quarter miles away.

In the sunken garden box hedges in the shape of crosses frame beds of roses, marigolds and salvia. At right is the 17th –century Kaffeehaus. Known in Rome by the German name, such pavilions were cool retreats for coffee and literary conversations.

Atop the niche for an antique bust are smaller versions of the cannonball finials and flaming urns that crown Priranesi’s monumental screen facing the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta.

A pool reflects the walled enclosure, that Edith Wharton called a “real ’secret garden’, full of sunny cloistered stillness, in restful contrast to the wide prospect below the terrace.”

Piranesi’s opportunity to built anything significant came when one of the pope’s nephews, Cardinal Giambattista Rezzonico, became grand prior of the Knights of Malta in Rome and hired Piranesi to restore the order’s church, Santa Maria del Priorato.

Thanks to an account book compiled from the daily worksheets of the contractor (now in the Avery Architectural Library of Columbia University), we can follow the work from November 1764, when the crumbling foundations first received attention, to October 1766, when the pope inspected the completed work and expressed his family’s satisfaction by making Piranesi a Knight of the Golden Spur. Soon after, the artist began to sign his work Cavaliere.