CASTELNUOVO DI FARFA 

The Sabina Oil Museum is dedicated to the oil of Sabina that the doctor Galen (2nd century AD) defined as the best in the ancient world. The nearby Farfa Abbey was one of the few medieval European centres in which the ancient techniques of olive growing were preserved and then transmitted. The museum is housed in Palazzo Perelli, a 16th century building that has been extensively tampered with and recently restored, but also extends to the historic centre and the landscape. The itinerary begins with a section dedicated to the myth of oil, celebrated by sculptures by contemporary masters Alik Cavaliere, Gianandrea Gazzola, Maria Lai and Hidetoshi Nagasawa. The visit continues with documentation on the botany of the Sabine olive tree and the tradition of olive growing, then with the memory room, where the world of oil is told by the voices and images of the farmers of Calstelnuovo. With a pedestrian path in the countryside, you can reach the early medieval site of San Donato where, near the restored church, the “Garden of the world’s olive trees ” it houses the different species cultivated in the Mediterranean basin and with them, symbolically, the peoples who share in history and in the present the culture of olive oil. It is part of the territorial museum system of the Middle Tiber Valley.

The church of San Donato, which can now be visited as the station of the Sabina Oil Museum, is immersed in the countryside, along the naturalistic itinerary that leads to the Farfa river.
The possession of Casale San Donato is attested in the records of the Abbey of Farfa since 768, and in 817 there is also the presence of a church. In 1046 the site housed a castellum or one of the original settlements then abandoned to give life to the medieval village of Castelnuovo di Farfa.
The archaeological site of San Donato was the subject of excavations in the 90s of the last century by the University of Sheffield (UK) as it represents one of the very few physical evidences of the passage between the Roman agricultural world and the medieval one.
The church, used for worship at least until the sixteenth century, was then abandoned and its ruins were finally incorporated into an agricultural building in the second half of the last century.
At the end of the 1990s the complex was acquired as part of the municipal heritage and the church was restored by reinstating the original volume on the basis of the planimetric evidence revealed by the excavations, and therefore intended to house a museum visit station: can listen to a contemporary song, with the Latin words of the chrismal hymn for Holy Thursday of Sant’Efrem Siro (4th century).

Villa d’Este, masterpiece of the Italian Garden, is included in the UNESCO world heritage list. With its impressive concentration of fountains, nymphs, grottoes, plays of water, and music, it constitutes a much-copied model for European gardens in the mannerist and baroque styles.

The garden is generally considered within the larger –and altogether extraordinary– context of Tivoli itself: its landscape, art and history which includes the important ruins of ancient villas such as the Villa Adriana, as well as a zone rich in caves and waterfalls displaying the unending battle between water and stone. The imposing constructions and the series of terraces above terraces bring to mind the hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the wonders of the ancient world. The addition of water– including an aqueduct tunneling beneath the city — evokes the engineering skill of the Romans themselves.

Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, after the disappointment of a failed bid for the papacy, brought back to life here the splendor of the courts of Ferrara, Rome and Fontainebleau and revived the magnificence of Villa Adriana. Governor of Tivoli from 1550, he immediately nurtured the idea of realizing a garden in the hanging cliffs of the “Valle gaudente”, but it was only after 1560 that his architectural and iconographic program became clear—brainchild of the painter-architect-archeologist Pirro Ligorio and realized by court architect Alberto Galvani.

The rooms of the Palace were decorated under the tutelage of the stars of the late Roman Mannerism, such as Livio Agresti, Federico Zuccari, Durante Alberti, Girolamo Muziano, Cesare Nebbia and Antonio Tempesta. The work was almost complete at the time of the Cardinal’s death (1572).

From 1605 Cardinal Alessandro d’Este gave the go-ahead to a new progam of interventions not only to restore and repair the vegetation and the waterworks, but also to create a new series of innovations to the layout of the garden and the decorations of the fountains.

Other works were carried out from 1660 – 70; these involved no less a figure than Gianlorenzo Bernini.

In the XVIIIth century the lack of maintenance led to the decay of the complex, which was aggravated by the property’s passage to the House of Hapsburg. The garden was slowly abandoned, the water works– no longer used–fell into ruin, and the collection of ancient statues— enlarged under Cardinal Ippolito, was disassembled and scattered.

This state of decay continued without interruption until the middle of the XIXth century, when Gustav Adolf von Hohenlohe, who obtained in enfiteusi the villa from the Dukes of Modena in 1851, launched a series of works to pull the complex back from its state of ruin. Between 1867 and 1882 the Villa once again became a cultural point of reference, with the Cardinal frequently hosting the musician Franz Liszt (1811 – 1886), who composed Giochi d’acqua a Villa d’Este for piano while a guest here, and who in 1879 gave one of his final concerts.

At the outbreak of the first world war the villa became a property of the Italian State, and during the 1920s it was restored and opened to the public. Another, radical restoration was carried out immediately after the Second World War to repair the damage caused by the bombing of 1944. Due to particularly unfavorable environmental conditions, the restorations have continued practically without interruption during the past twenty years (among these it is worth noting the recent cleaning of the Organ Fountain and also the “Birdsong.”)