Il cortile della scala regia, Villa Farnese

Speranza



Cardinal Alessandro Farnese commissioned Vignola in 1550 to convert the foundations of an unfinished fortress in the wild contry of the Monti Cimini some thirty-five miles to the north-west of Rome into a palace for his retirement.

The Villa Farnese, the most splendid of Italian ville, except perhaps for Caserta, is a bastioned pentagon raised up on a platform, surrounded by a moat and enclosing a circular court.

Its monumental shape dominates the mysterious wooded landscape in which it is set and dwarfs the village of Caprarola to which it is joined by an ingenious series of steps, ramps and terrances.

The interior of Villa Farnese is so contrived that every room contained within the pentagon formed by the building is regular in shape.

The staircase leads up to one of the faces of the pentagon and rests upon paired columns with cornices of the various order: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite, following the shallow steps.

The walls and ceilings are enriched with frescoed arabesques, allergories, and symbolic devices by Antonio Tempesta.

Vignola began his career as a painter and showed himself a master of perspective but this marvellous staircase, the "Scala Regia", is more than the work of a mathematical genius: it is the offspring of a poetic imagination.