LANDSCAPE AND GARDEN IDEAS IN/FOR FLORIDA-LOOKING FOR IDEAS AROUND THE WORLD
The Garden of Ninfa (Italy)
It’s almost impossible to say what Ninfa really is. Painters, musicians, poets, gardeners,statesmen, experts of landscaping, students – all these continue to visit Ninfa for inspiration it provides and the magic in works in them.It’s not only an outstandingly beautiful garden but a retreat, an inspiration, a cultural stimulus.
Ninfa is often described as a vision of paradise.
The garden of Ninfa is situated forty-five miles southeast of Rome. The garden was laid out in the 1920s among the ruins of the small medieval town of Ninfa founded in the eight century and destroyed in 1381.
The town was built at the foot of the Mountains Lepini next to a small lake fed by springs of pure, ice-cold water. The building of the town and later of the creation of the garden, in that place, was motivated by abundance of the waters (as many places in the past centuries).
Ninfa has a very particular microclimate. It is exposed to the south but protected from the north by the mountains. It avoids the cold winds while capturing and storing in limestone rocks the warmth of the Mediterranean.
The garden was conceived and developed by the last three generations of the Caetani family – owners of Ninfa and surrounding land for ages. Now the garden is one of several properties owned and administered by the Fondazione Roffredo Caetani.
The strict roles for public visits have made possible to preserve the integrity anf harmony of the whole garden. In the running of the garden much attention is given to the balance between nature, water, historic monuments and man himself. The result is a blend of cultivated and the wild, of the romantic and the rational, and above all – a sensation of the mystery and the sacred.
