ITALY'S GARDEN OF MONSTERS

Why did a Renaissance duke fill his wooded park with gargantuan stone

- DANIEL WEISS

A sculpture known as the Hell Mouth is one of several dozen fantastical creations dating to the sixteenth century that line the paths of a park called the Sacro Bosco, or Sacred Wood, near the central Italian town of Bomarzo. The Hell Mouth was designed to serve as an alfresco dining room, with its tongue forming the table. AN ENORMOUS BUG-EYED dragon fends off an attack by a pair of lions. The toothy maw of a killer whale erupts from the earth across the way from an immense lumbering tortoise that carries a female figure, perhaps the goddess Fame, on its back. A huge siren with two tails sits opposite an equally large winged harpy with a serpent's tail and a lion's claws. These fantastical sculptures are among dozens of such creations lining the paths that wind through a forested ravine below Bomarzo, a medieval town in the Lazio region of Italy. Known as the Sacro Bosco, or the Sacred Wood, this is among the most unusual designed landscapes of the Italian Renaissance. “Upon first visiting the Sacro Bosco, I was completely overwhelmed by the scale of the statuary and how interestingly it was woven into the landscape,” says John Garton, an art historian at Clark University. “You would literally come out of vegetation and suddenly there would be this more than two-story-tall monument carved out of native stone. I've since realized it's meant to be jarring. It's intended to be this site of spectacular revelations where monsters come to life and things that have only been known through literature and books jump out at you.”