Just a few kilometres from Viterbo, in Bagnaia, next to Cimini Mountains there is the astonishing Villa Lante, a perfect between nature and architecture in the Tuscia. The Villa was built in 1200 by the Viterbo prelates, who were the Lord of Bagnaia. At the time the Villa was not completed and we have to wait 3 centuries to see it finished. In the 1500 the cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, grandson of Leone X, realized an aqueduct and for the first time water was introduced. Maybe he had already in mind to build great fountains.

It is a mannerist wonder, an aristocratic retreat, a delightful villa and a fortified residence, designed by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (who transformed an early project by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger) and built between 1559 and 1575. Alessandro Farnese the Younger – created a cardinal at the young age of 14, by his grandfather, pope Paul III – entrusted Vignola with reviewing Sangallo’s designs, although he maintained the formidable pentagonal structure that gives the building a peculiar grandiosity, with a harmonious mix of military and civilian architecture lines. Alessandro Farnese was one of Rome’s most famous patrons of the arts in the 1500s: his grandfather could not look after all the works he undertook to make the city more monumental, so he delegated him, allowing him to meet and work with all the best creative minds of his time.