Villa d'este

On Wednesday Sept. 14th we went to the Villa d'este, just outside of Rome. The villa is considered one of the major engineering and hydraulics accomplishment of the Renaissance era.



Here's a view from the top of the garden at the villa balcony looking down on the garden, and a view looking out toward Rome.




The Organ Pipe fountain. Every two hours enough water pressure builds up to make the fountain play a song, which sounded just like an organ!






This is the famous 1000 fountains fountain. It spans the width of the garden on one terrace level. Here's a close up of one of the spouts. It was spectacular.



This portion of the garden is called Rometta.



Here's a view from the bottom of the garden looking up toward the Villa. When you enter the garden, you get to walk through part of the villa. Each wall I saw was elaborately painted. Pretty amazing.

Below are some of the flowers I saw in the garden. The hollyhock was stunning. Unfortunately, the grapes were way to high up to pick. Pictures just don't do this garden justice...experiencing the various water works is pretty incredible. Thinking about how on earth the plumbing of this garden was executed during the Renaissance without the assistance of pumps and electricity boggles the mind.

For those of you wondering if we're acutally doing any school work over here, we had to do two sketches and two watercolors by Thursday. I did two sketches and a watercolor here, and no, I'm not even considering posting those! Hopefully I'll get better by the end of the trip.