How Bomarzo was built and evolved over time

The Sacro Bosco was built by carving rather than by placing.

Many of the larger-than-life sculptures are sculpted in the bedrock itself, which is why they sit where they do: the garden follows the outcrops of a predominantly barren landscape rather than a surveyed plan.

There is, by design, no legible order. The many monstrous statues appear unconnected to any rational plan and appear to have been strewn almost randomly about the area — sol per sfogare il Core, just to set the heart free, as one inscription on an obelisk puts it.

The authorship is clear and the design attribution is not. It is the work of Pier Francesco Orsini, called Vicino (1528–1588), and the design has been attributed to Pirro Ligorio, a well-known architect and antiquarian of the time.

Some of it plays games with building itself. Next to a formal exedra stands a tilting building, the so-called Casa Storta or Twisted House, and a small octagonal temple was added about twenty years later in honour of Giulia Farnese.

The reason for the whole layout remains largely unknown; one suggestion is that it was meant as a foil to the perfect symmetry and layout of the great Renaissance gardens nearby at Villa Farnese in Caprarola and Villa Lante at Bagnaia.

And it had to be rebuilt as a ruin is rebuilt: overgrown and neglected through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, it was restored from the 1970s by the Bettini family.