A Grand Tour of Gardens: Traveling in Beauty through Western Europe and the United States

Ninfa: A Romantic Italian Garden

Ninfa A Romantic Italian Garden SOUTH OF ROME AND NORTH OF NAPLES, the garden of Ninfa is situated below the escarpment of Norma and the Lepini Mountains. It has been described as a Medieval Pompeii. The garden was laid out in the 1920s among the ruins of the small medieval town of Ninfa founded in the eighth century. Today, with an abundance of spring-fed water and a salubrious microclimate, the garden flourishes in the middle of vast vineyards and olive orchards. The garden is rich in color with more than twelve thousand flowering shrubs, trees, bulbs, and water plants. Pinks, yellows, iridescent greens, bronzes, deep roses, blues, and grays please the eye with a rainbow palette. On one of the days that we visited, the spring-fed river of Ninfa reflected the aqua, blue, gray, and black of the sky as well as trailing vines of wisteria, clematis, and purple irises. There was a barrage of sweet birdsong from hundreds of species that make Ninfa their home. The wind harpies played in the huge towering pines, singing their songs. Finally, there were tempting smells of breath of spring, lavender, and roses. The garden is a veritable paradise to tempt all the senses and thus awaken a wonder at the bounty of nature. Ninfa combines the ruins of an old and venerable medieval town with today’s garden. The land has been owned by one family, the Caetini, for more than seven hundred years. Ninfa began in the 700s as a small crossroads located on the Apian way, between Naples and Rome. It became the fiefdom of the popes. The land was acquired by Pietro Caetini in 1297 for 200,000 gold florins. The town flourished under the Caetinis with 2,000 inhabitants, 150 houses, gardens, fields, a castle with a double-walled enclosure, and seven churches. Ninfa was sacked in 1381 by mercenary troops from Brittany, and its inhabitants fled to Sermoneta. The village was abandoned, forgotten, and crumbled into a maze of walls and fallen church apses covered by vines and trees. In the 1920s Gelasio Caetani and his wife, Ada, who still held the land for the Caetani family, began the restoration of the area within the old walls. Gelasio was an architect and had restored the castle that surmounts Sermoneta. He knew the methods for bringing old brick, stones, and mortar to life. Ada planted the old streets with alleys of towering cypresses and cedars. She also ensured there was an abundance of flowering shrubs and trees: apples, magnolias, and peaches. Gelasio restored the dam on the lake and strengthened the five bridges over the Ninfa River. Ninfa 31 Into the clear white waters of the river, Gelasio introduced African trout. The old and forgotten ruin was once again alive with the sound of human voices. Ada’s sister-in-law, Marguerite Caetani, inherited the garden. Her specialty was camellias, roses, and maples whose bronze, yellow, and green leaves were to give the garden a fall perspective. With her husband, Roffredo, she designed distinctive watercourses that are richly planted with irises and a bamboo grove. After World War II the estate passed to Lelia Caetani, who had married Hubert Howard. Lelia The tower at Ninfa, near Latina, Italy 32 Italian Gardens was an artist, and her palette created the color, form, and continuity throughout the seasons that make Ninfa a garden for each day of the year. Ninfa is a romantic garden. Each turn of a path surprises with another ruin or towering tree or flowering shrub. Only by wandering the paths among the ruins does one discover the abundance of color, form, and shape. Such surprises are the antithesis of a classic garden where one is led by geometric paths to ultimate focal points. There is no one focal point, but a plethora of changing shapes as plants and ruins intermingle. The garden is a garden of moods, with its central life the singing river Ninfa. Wherever one walks, there are vistas that include the yellow, pink, and ochre tower of the castle, the green and blue escarpment of the surrounding mountains , the aqua blue of the firmament, and the abundant, intense green of the plants intertwined with the old ruins. If you go: Hotel Principe Serrone, via Del Serrone, Sermoneta, Italia (Tel. 0773 30342 or 30343, Fax 0773 30336); hotel.serrone@virgilio.it. Ninfa is open on the first weekend of every...