|
| |
|
CAPRAROLA |
| |
|
|
| |
Over and above the lake's sheer prettiness, there's not much besides
the odd attractive village and a scattering of Roman and Etruscan
remains - none terribly interesting in their own right, but worthwhile
if you can string several together. More properly deserving of
individual attention is the Palazzo Farnese at CAPRAROLA , which, like
the villas at Bagnaia and Bomarzo , ranks among the high points of
seventeenth-century Italian Mannerism.
The town is pleasant enough, owing its present prosperity to vast
hazelnut groves that blanket the surrounding countryside, though you
can't help feeling the place is simply an excuse for the palace , which
stands huge and imposing at the top of the steep main street (Tues-Sun:
March-Oct 9am-6.30pm; Nov-Feb 9am-4pm; L4000/2.07, includes garden tour;
www.isa.it/tuscia/caprarola ). The building is clearly a masterpiece;
Stendhal described it as a building where "architecture married Nature".
Begun by Antonio di Sangallo the Younger for Pierluigi Farnese in the
early 1520s, it was originally more a castle than a palace, situated at
the centre of the lands belonging to the Farnese family. Later, Cardinal
Alessandro Farnese took up residence here, in 1559 hiring Vignola to
modify the building while retaining the peculiar pentagonal floor-plan.
Vignola was an inspired choice. Apprenticed at Fontainebleau, he was
among the most accomplished architects of the late Renaissance, and
exemplifies the Mannerist style at its best in his creation at Caprarola,
which celebrates the period's values of superiority of art over nature
and style over substance, together with a self-satisfied, almost
gloating eulogizing of the patron's virtues.
Of the palace's five floors only the piano nobile is open to the public,
and there's no escaping a certain seediness that seems to have overtaken
the place of late, both in the fag-ends and graffiti in the curving
forecourt and in the state rooms themselves, which have lost all their
furniture, suffering a cold, unlived-in feel as a result. There are
frescoes from 1560, most of them by the brothers Zuccari chronicling the
Farnese family's greatness, much lauded as the building's highlight
(though some are embarrassingly crude and others terribly knocked
about), and a monumental spiral staircase up to a circular courtyard.
The courtyard gives onto the main rooms of the piano nobile , huge and
heavy with its thirty pairs of columns but considered to be one of
Vignola's finest moments. The first and last rooms are perhaps the best,
however, the first with a super-embellished grotto-like fireplace and
pictures of local communities like Caprarola itself (the central scene
is an imaginary one), the last, the Sala del Mappomondo - about the only
place not given over to glorifying the Farnese clan - decorated with
huge painted maps of the known world and a wonderful ceiling fresco of
the constellations.
Outside there are twin gardens (guided tours Mon-Sat 10am, 1.30pm, 3pm &
5pm; same ticket as palace), divided into a south-facing summer terrace
and an east-facing winter terrace, with plants and design appropriate to
each. Look out for the artificial grotto and the stalactites, brought
from a real cave and stuck on.
|
| |
|
