The Borghese Gardens

Here we offer an itinerary into what is maybe the most well-known Villa of Rome, but we attempt to look at it with a different eye. A villa which is in fact a whole set of villas, pulled together, blended, cancelled, and bit by bit rewritten, to arrive only at about 1840 to the actual setting. Places of great allure and seduction, like Villetta Doria, absolutely the first exotic and landscape garden into Rome, or the Casino dei Giochi d’Acqua (Water Games Casino), then orangery and today Bilotti Museum. We will proceed, heading to Piazza di Siena, discovering buildings like Casina dell’Orologio and Casina of Raffaello, in a space which blends Roman classicism (The circus-hippodrome) to the Tuscan roots (from Siena) of the Borghese family. We will arrive to the Lake garden, the result of a late XVIII century arrangement, already romantic for its free landscaping and for the reference to an idealized classical world. We will talk about that real unprecedented which was Villetta Doria and about its creator Francesco Bettini, an outlandish and peculiar artist.