Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility
This site has limited support for your browser. We recommend switching to Edge, Chrome, Safari, or Firefox.

Cart 0

No more products available for purchase

Products
Pair with
Is this a gift?
Add order notes or ask for an invoice
Subtotal Free

Shipping, taxes, and discount codes are calculated at checkout

Where Wonder Takes Root

June 04, 2026

Where Wonder Takes Root

Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo: the Orcus

There are two places, in the heart of Italy, where art, nature and architecture collide, and, above all, where one is invited to embrace a state of mind: the surrender to something inexplicable, and simply wondrous. The Sacro Bosco di Bomarzo and the Giardino dei Tarocchi in Capalbio are spaces conceived to gently disorient, to blend distant registers until they become inseparable. Children of one another, but above all children of their times, they intertwine personal histories with the history of faraway worlds, the order of the stars with that of hidden little forests.

Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo: the Turtle

In Bomarzo, near Viterbo, it is an antiquarian-leaning architect such as Pirro Ligorio who conceives, in the mid-16th century, an unprecedented place for Pier Francesco Orsini. A grove in the Tuscia becomes something that still has no name: it is not an Italian-style garden, nor is it still Renaissance. It belongs to a Mannerism that evokes, blends, contaminates, and suddenly astonishes: we are almost in the Baroque. Mythical creatures carved in peperino stone, enigmatic inscriptions, architectures that defy gravity. The Mouth of the Orcus, the face of the grove, swallows visitors into a chamber where nothing is vertical and every voice returns in increasingly surreal echoes. The Capa Pendente (Leaning House) overturns all logic, tilted as it rests on a boulder with floors set at odd angles; a Victory stands on the shell of a tortoise, and so does a tower on the back of an elephant. Nymphs, Gorgons, Proserpinas, Proteus with the world on his head: among the trees and the moss that permeates the wood, the sculptures suggest what we then read, spoken by the Orcus itself – “Ogni pensiero vola”, every thought flies. Salvador Dalí would also fall under the spell of the Bosco, and he would not be the only artist drawn into this story.

The Tarot Garden by Niki de Saint Phalle in Capalbio: the Magician, the High Priestess, the Wheel of Fortune.

By DustyLosAngeles - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Giardino dei Tarocchi is, in fact, a descendant of Bomarzo, even if it comes four centuries later. It is after discovering the Sacro Bosco, following an initial revelation at Parc Güell by Antoni Gaudí, that French artist Niki de Saint Phalle finally committed to her vision of a garden, in the heart of the Maremman landscape. She began in 1979; it opened in 1998. It is a project so deeply rooted in her inner world that the unfinished works at her death were never completed. It represents the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot, archetypes that traverse time from cathedrals to fortune-teller’s tables. The sculptures rise up to 15 metres, shimmering, surreal, inhabitable: steel and concrete structures covered in ceramics, glass and mirrors. Esotericism, folklore, dream imagery, and above all multiple dimensions and narratives intersect in those years in Capalbio: Saint Phalle living within the park during its creation, together with her husband Jean Tinguely, who contributes several works; artists who collaborate on the sculptures; and architect Mario Botta, who designs the entrance pavilion. Here, guided tours are not permitted: each visitor must allow themselves to be carried by their own perception. After all, as we read once again in Bomarzo, “Animus quiescendo fit prudentior ergo”. The mind, in silence, becomes wiser.

Curated by Domus - © Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Recent articles