‘Impressions so alien’: the afterlives of the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo

Abstract

The history of a garden is a narrative constructed on the basis of factual evidence, but also shaped by shifting ideological pressures and historical circumstances over the long durée of its existence. The study of the reception or afterlife of a particular garden allows us to see how it changed over time, was reformulated by its visitors, and how these changes have influenced its subsequent interpretations. Despite this widely shared understanding, the afterlife of the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo has received little critical attention, though its complex historiography was inseparably tied to political and social shifts in twentieth-century Italy. The traditional histories of the Sacro Bosco suggest that in the early seventeenth century this garden had fallen into disrepair and obscurity until it was suddenly ‘rediscovered’ after World War II. In less than a decade, between the late 1940s and mid-1950s, Bomarzo became the subject of an unprecedented amount of public and scholarly attention, being caught on camera and featured on screen, publicized in newspapers and discussed in academic journals. From 1955 onwards, it also prominently entered the art historical discourse. This article scrutinizes and corrects this picture by taking a fresh look both at the early twentieth-century reception and historiography of the Sacro Bosco and various writings and media devoted to it in post-war Italy. In doing so, it reveals the origins and production of dominant scholarly narratives that continue to influence our understanding of Bomarzo, their relationship with political pressures and ideological agendas of the time, and their long-lasting effects on the garden’s image in both popular culture and specialist literature. The point of departure for this analysis is the concept of the giardino all’italiana fostered by Mussolini’s fascist regime, from which I move to the discussion of contrasting interpretative frameworks – Surrealist art, Neorealist cinema and the notion of Mannerism as an ‘anti-classical’ style – mobilized in post-war Italy to explain this intriguing site. In addition, this article draws on previously unpublished evidence – such as personal photographs, films and various writings – that shed new light on such debated questions as the extent to which the Sacro Bosco was known to early twentieth-century visitors and its place in the history of Italian gardens and sculpture. By bringing together these divergent approaches, media and contexts that informed the afterlife of Bomarzo, this article’s aim is to launch a critical reevaluation of the early historiography of this site. This task, as the following analysis shows, only becomes feasible if we acknowledge various, often poorly known, ways in which the post-war ‘rediscovery’ of the Sacro Bosco was intimately tied to the social and political history of twentieth-century Italy.