Villa d'Este Tivoli
— the sound of water arranged like a garden.
Not only on a wall.
“A Renaissance cardinal's hillside, an hour east of Rome. Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este gave the slope to water in 1550 and the engineers worked the rest of his life on the plumbing. Cento Fontane runs the length of one terrace, a hundred small mouths feeding one long pool. The organ fountain still plays a tune on the hour, on water pressure alone. The cascade was old when Liszt sat down at a piano here and wrote about it. Nothing in the garden uses a pump; the water arrives from the Aniene through a tunnel under the town and runs by gravity through every fountain on the slope.
Villa d'Este Tivoli, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Villa d'Este sits on the eastern edge of Tivoli, an old Roman hill town about 30 km east of Rome in the Lazio region. Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este began the project in 1550, the year he was appointed governor of Tivoli, converting a Benedictine convent into his residence and handing the steep terraced slope below it to his architect Pirro Ligorio. Work continued until the cardinal's death in 1572. The site is reached in under an hour from Rome by regional train to Tivoli station. The villa joined the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.
No pumps. Every jet, organ, and cascade at Villa d'Este runs on gravity alone, fed by the Aniene river through a tunnel cut beneath Tivoli in the 1560s. The garden covers roughly four hectares of terraced hillside descending from the villa down toward the Roman plain. The Hundred Fountains stretch about a hundred metres along one terrace, the spouts feeding a single channel decorated with carved reliefs of the d'Este eagles, lilies, and boats. The Fontana dell'Organo houses a hydraulic pipe organ that still plays on a posted schedule, the air for its pipes pressed by falling water. The Rometta terrace at the far end of the garden miniatures Rome itself.
Open daily except Mondays, with hours that shift by season; tickets are bought at the entrance on Piazza Trento in central Tivoli or online in advance. The villa rooms come first, their walls frescoed in the 1560s by a workshop of Roman painters that included Federico Zuccari and Girolamo Muziano, then the garden opens downhill from the loggia. The Fontana dell'Organo's water-powered organ plays on a schedule posted at the entrance, usually a few times each afternoon. From Rome, the regional train from Roma Tiburtina reaches Tivoli in about an hour, then a short walk through the old town. Comfortable shoes matter; the garden is steep and wet, and the lower terraces are slick after rain.