Villa Borghese Gardens

Villa Borghese in Italy unfolds as a designed landscape of broad avenues, ancient trees, lawns, ordered gardens and small buildings. The park covers about eighty hectares. Its paths connect quiet garden rooms with museums, historic façades and open spaces, creating the sense of a separate world within the landscape.

The story began in 1600, when Cardinal Scipione Borghese united several vineyards into a residence with gardens, artworks and hunting grounds. Flaminio Ponzio designed the Villa Pinciana. Giovanni Vasanzio continued the work after Ponzio’s death. The Casino Nobile became the home of the cardinal’s collection, now displayed in the Galleria Borghese with works by Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Bernini and Canova. The original grounds joined the formal pars urbana with the more natural pars rustica. In the eighteenth century, Antonio and Mario Asprucci reshaped the garden around an artificial lake and its island temple dedicated to Aesculapius.

Later additions keep that history visible among the trees. The seventeenth-century Uccelliera carries Borghese eagles and dragons on its façade. The former orangery houses the Carlo Bilotti Museum, while the Pietro Canonica Museum combines sculpture with the artist’s private home. A lake, a museum or a historic façade can appear at the end of any avenue.