SHARRYLAND
The Chigi Park of Ariccia
For Stendhal, the most beautiful forest in the world.
Where is
What it is and where it is
Ancient ruins, architecture hidden among the trees, caves, fountains and reminders of supernatural beings that once roamed here. It sounds like the ideal place to set a fantasy tale, but instead it is real: a forest that stretches behind Palazzo Chigi, in Ariccia, covering an area of 28 hectares. Magical creatures aside, it is the centuries-old trees that are exciting. A few examples? A wonderful oak boasts as many as four hundred years while a sequoia planted in 1860, stands as a candidate to be the oldest sequoia in Europe!
Why it's special
One of the most exciting features of Chigi Park is closely linked to the forest's origin. Before it was connected to the grandiose palace, in fact, it had been a sacred forest, Nemus Aricinum. At that time it was much more extensive, but what remains today still retains the strong emotional charge of a vegetation full of mystery, where people entered fearing or hoping for an encounter with the goddess Diana who roamed among the trees. The connection with the goddess remained even in the time of the Savelli and later the Chigi: the forest was their hunting ground, so much so that even today it is known as Barco Chigi.
Not to be missed
Among the architecture and monuments that little by little went to embellish the forest, one of the most striking is surely the Uccelliera. It was built at the behest of the Savelli family in 1628 by exploiting the environment of an ancient Roman quarry. Elegant arches remained suspended amidst the greenery, a reminder of the ancient aviary. Two centuries later, this area was enriched with a central fountain and transformed into a garden.
A bit of history
Chigi Park began as a "Barco" of the Savelli family, that is, an enclosed area intended for hunting, which developed mainly in the 1600s with the designs of Bernini and Fontana. During the 1700s and 1800s the park was a destination on the Grand Tour d'Italie, along with the Locanda Martorelli, reproduced in numerous paintings by artists and described in the literary works of Goethe, Stendhal and D'Annunzio. The history of the place itself, however, goes back much further, as evidenced by the surviving blocks of a first-century AD monument of the proprector of Mesia, Tiberius Latinus Pandusa, from the Appia Antica.
Curiosities
At the time of the Grand Tour many illustrious names came to visit the park. It is said, however, that someone quite different from them also took advantage of the woods: this was the fearsome brigand Gasparone, who, at the time of the Chigi family, took refuge in a cave hidden in the thick vegetation and still exists today.
Chigi Park and Palace in Ariccia
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