Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.
We had been living in Rome for about a year when we decided to go and see the monsters. The garden at Bomarzo is ninety minutes north of the city, which is a bit too inconvenient for a day trip, so we decided to stay a couple of days in Viterbo and see not just Bomarzo but this real city on the Lazio-Tuscan border. It also had plenty of places to stay, eat, and shop, so it made sense to make it our headquarters for a few days.
We drove up there on the 23rd of February, 2022. Looking back at this memory from mid-2026, I can understand why we felt surreal, disoriented, and a bit stressed out during this stay. If you are Ukrainian, you also understand why. Just a day after we have arrived to Viterbo, Russia started its “special military operation” against Ukraine, which is the Russian way of saying “invasion.”
Now, we are Hungarians, which means we have a shared border with Ukraine. We were also invaded and ruled by Russia for decades behind the Iron Curtain. And even though I was living in Italy at that time, far away from this, my family was still living in Hungary. So, trust me, I know what it feels like to have Russian boots on your ground, and I remember how shocked I was during that February. Even typing this out now makes me horribly angry, and please don’t ask me ever what I think about Russians and what I think would be the ideal city landscape for Moscow, because I would probably end up with something like “level it down to the parking lot, please,” and we don’t want this here, do we?
So, back to Viterbo. Which was leveled down to the parking lot, how ironic and sad to say this, by the way. But it is true, and I didn’t know this when I visited. On our first day, we went into the old city for a walk and to grab some food and noticed something odd about this city immediately. It’s not like any other Italian city we went to before.
Almost all Italian cities are built the same way. The center is old, I mean very old. Depending on the city, it can be a few hundred years old, older than the Renaissance, and in some cases, even older. The piazza’s stones saw more horses and carts than cars. The buildings are thick stone ones: grey and fortress-like in the North, and lighter and narrower in the South. Residential stone buildings are peppered with grandiose palaces, depending on how rich the town was. And there is a big church, maybe two, on a piazza, with restaurants and bars older than most countries.
You almost never see modern buildings in these cities. You can find modern residential or office architecture outside the old town. Why? Well, to start, there is no room in the center. If there were, you'd need an archeological excavation first, and then you could build anything on top of a thousand-year-old city. Not to mention the insanely complex and protective regulations. If you want to build anything new in the city center in Italy, you have to bomb down some buildings.
Which is why Viterbo looks the way it is now. The old town, the San Pellegrino district, and the surrounding area are a bit weird. Beautiful medieval buildings, narrow streets, and rich architecture. It tells the town's story: Rome's northern capital, an important city in the Papal States, a place where cardinals came to spend time. The San Pellegrino district is Europe's largest intact thirteenth-century quarter. Grey volcanic stone buildings with staircases outside of the houses, which are shouldered together with super-narrow alleys. And then, out of nothing, a horrendous block of residential building from the 50s and 60s, cornered shaped, glass, concrete, and that unexplainable sensation in my stomach. Italians dedicate entire Facebook groups and pages just for these ugly modernist buildings, these tasteless stains on a landscape. I fully understand why.
I wanted to understand. Turns out, Viterbo was bombed a lot during the war (mostly by the Allies). The targets were the German airfield outside the walls and the road junction where the Cassia splits for the sea. Rome was spared as an open city, plus because of the Vatican. Florence was an art city, protected by both sides. Well, the Germans did blow up the bridges, but at least Florence’s centro wasn’t carpet bombed. Unlike Viterbo, which was a supply command center behind the front. Once Naples was captured, the front shifted to Anzio, then moved step by step north. Viterbo was heavily hit to cut the supply lines. Unlike today, there were no precision strikes, and as said, the airfield was just outside the old city walls, so, go figure. Entire parts of the medieval town came down. A third of the housing was destroyed. So, when Berlin finally got what it deserved, the rebuilding started. But you can’t rebuild something from medieval times. Also, it’s the 50s, Europe is in ruins. Look at post-war Netherlands, for example. Those housing projects? Horrendous. But they had to rebuild the entire country from the ashes. Same here. This is why Viterbo has weird modernist buildings inside fully medieval streets.
I lived in London for many years and worked inside the Square Mile, aka the City of London. I adore that place. I don’t know how the Brits could pull it off, probably endless cash helps, but it’s only London where you can put a full-glass office high-rise surrounded by 200-years-old pubs and residential Victorian housings, and it looks amazing. And I know the story is somewhat the same there too: the Germans bombed the city without aiming at anything, and on top of the rubble, Brits could build something new. But while Britain had its colonial cash-cow background and some funds from the young bros across the Pond, they were able to do something genuinely interesting. In Italy, well, Italy was kinda alone, without funds, and though Allies were welcomed when they arrived in Naples, as Robert Capa said, famous Hungarian photographer, who came with the troops, “Never forget, two weeks ago these people were cheering for the Duce.” So, it was kinda hard to secure funds that time, I guess. Hence why 50s residential in Italy look like stains on a wonderful landscape.
Again, how ironic that I was Googling this background story for the town, while the same thing happens in another country. And history repeats itself: Russians bombed down Kharkiv’s historic center, Chernihiv’s old town, Odesa’s UNESCO historic site, and everyone remembers when they shamefully bombed the Mariupol theatre while civilians were sheltering inside, adding plus one to the already endless-long list of Russian war crimes.
Viterbo had been important once, which is the other reason it hurts to look at. In the thirteenth century, the popes could not govern Rome because Rome was run by its own commune, and the commune wanted them gone, so for a couple of decades the papacy moved up here and ran the Church from a palace beside the cathedral. I wrote a lot about how cardinals ran the Papal States in my article about Caprarola. That one included Giulia Farnese.
After our walk in Viterbo, we went to see some monsters. No, not the Russians again, but stone-built monsters in a surrealist, sacred garden, created by a war hero soldier. I’ve told you that this piece will be full of war. And Giulia Farnese. Anyway, Bomarzo is twenty minutes east of Viterbo. A small village under a huge, and insanely beautiful Orsini palace. It looks like, if the entire town was built around the palace. Which is kinda true. But we are not here for the palace this time, but for the garden of monsters.
Almost everything in Italy is very well-oiled when it comes to tourism. You can find the main landmarks and sights, because everything is explained and pointed out by signs. Not here. The garden doesn’t belong to the State of Italy, so it doesn’t get the treatment of the State of Italy. It is a private property, run by a family. It doesn’t even have a proper name. It is called Sacred Forest (Sacro Bosco), or Bomarzo Gardens, or simply Monster Park. It is outside the village, but you can still see the gardens' heritage: the Orsini palace.
I’ve promised you a soldier and Giulia Farnese, so here they are. Pier Francesco Orsini, born in 1523, built the garden. He was a soldier, went to war for the Farnese pope in his twenties, was captured, released, and came home to the Orsini palace, married a relative of the pope, Giulia Farnese, not the one in Caprarola, just another Giulia, another Farnese, few decades later than the original one. Anyway, Pier Francesco just got married to the cousin of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the man who was at that time busy building his great palace at Caprarola on the other side of Lake Vico, and with this marriage, Pier Francesco got really rich.
But then, Giulia died. She was very young. So, Pier Francesco went full monk-style, picked up an Epicurean life, which roughly means: get drunk, build a garden with big statues, get left alone in it with some artists, and never get in touch with reality again. He dedicated the entire garden to his wife, Giulia.
The money was new for Pier Francesco Orsini, and we all know what happens with newly rich people: they run through the money fast. Only a few can preserve it for future generations. So, after his death, his sons kept the place, within a few decades, they spent the wealth. Eventually, only 60 years after Pier Francesco’s death, the entire estate was sold to cover debts, then left alone and neglected. The palace became state property, so it was renovated. But the garden grew fully overgrown and was left completely alone. In the early 1900s, artists started visiting it. It spread via word-of-mouth. Dalí and Michelangelo Antonioni filmed there. After the war, the Bettini family purchased it as private property. Their children still run it as a ticketed venue.
This is why there are no official signs in the town pointing to the garden. But there is a bar, a car park, and a ticket booth. It looks like a private garden with a ticketed gate. Which is. When we visited, we were the only people there. I don’t think anyone else visits at any other time.
The garden is tended but not like a noble garden for a palace. It’s rough. Nature is nature here. No clipped hedges, no fountain in the middle. It is wood, mostly wood, with uneven ground, damp paths, raw vegetation. Every so often, the woods open up, and there is a huge stone turtle the size of a car. Or, you walk in the woods with some rain drizzles, and then there is a large carved troll that has a mouth like a cave entrance. It’s completely surreal, I can see why Dalí loved it.
The statues are hundreds of years old. The forest is even older. Everything looks as if it’s been left alone for centuries. Nothing is constructed for the show. There are some new chairs, and a pathway that seems newly constructed, with ramps on the hillside to keep you from falling off, but that is about it. The bar has coffee and drinks. The parking is dirt, damp, and rough. The only kinda-tidy thing here is a small temple, more like a chapel that Pier Francesco built for Giulia. He wrote on one of the stones: “just to set the heart free.” Basically explains the entire garden. It has no concept, no structure, no plan, no nothing. It is just big stone statues, randomly placed in the woods, with no background or rationality whatsoever.
This is why this place is still magical.
I had gone up to Viterbo to see a garden of monsters. By the second evening, it seemed to me I had it backward. The monsters are in the city. But unlike Orsini, these weren’t there to let the heart out. He lost a war, his freedom for a while, then his wife, and what he did with all that loss was walk down the hill for thirty years and put stone statues into the woods. Each walk, he probably remembered his losses. Doing this walk during the times of war was a mixed bag of feelings. Sad. Surreal. Extremely surreal. But also hopeful. The garden was built not just because of sorrow, but to remember love.
