Lake Nemi was sacred to the virgin goddess Diana, huntress and protector of childbirth the remains of her shrine have only been partially excavated.  The moon is associated with her and the lake is called Speculum Dianae (Diana’s Mirror) – it particularly captivated the poets and composers who made their homes here.

The Roman emperors recreated naval battles known as  Naumachie on nearby Lake Albano, a form of gladiatorial spectacle involving killing and actual sinkings. When they found submerged boats on Lake Nemi in the 1930s they were presumed to be pleasure boats rather than warships as Lake Nemi was a sacred lake. They were raised and a museum built, but sadly they were destroyed by accident during WW2.

Section of ancient Roman wall in Diana’s shrine, showing ‘opus reticulatum’ and brickwork

Diana’s altar, still in use by modern adherents to her cult, offerings of fruit, prayers and candles.

Nemi is also associated with the myth of Rex Nemorensis, the story of which begins and ends James Frazer’s famous work of anthropology, The Golden Bough (1890). The story goes that the high priest of the shrine at Nemi to Diana, achieved the role through mortal combat with his predecessor; he in turn would be slain by his successor, and so on through the ages. As Macaulay put it:

Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.

The contender had first to prove his metal by plucking a golden bough (most likely mistletoe growing on the sacred oak) from Diana’s Grove, thus the origin of the legend. Recently, archeologists discovered the fossilised remains of an oak within the sanctuary. Cannabis was cultivated on the shores in ancient times and may have been involved in sacred rituals.

statue of Diana in Nemi village

Nemi, the main street

Strawberries both wild and cultivated

Patrick holds up the famous bread, baked in wood-fired ovens, in nearby Genzano (with a wild boar sausage necklace).

Nemi on the distant hill and Lake Nemi in 1831

A fanciful view of Lake Nemi in The Golden Bough by JMW Turner (1834)

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The Val D’Orcia is one of the most famous valleys in the world even though the name itself may not mean much. Tourists have travelled the Roman road called the via Cassia since the 16th century on the Grand Tour, but before them it was trod by pilgrims on their way to Rome and before that the Roman Legions. In fact scenes from The Gladiator were filmed here.

The Grand Tour

The Medici family constructed Post Houses along the road to welcome the Grand Tourists on their travels. We visited the Osteria Grande in Radicofani and photographed its abandoned interior in 2017. Personally I love photographing uninhabited ghostly buildings. Constructed in 1584 , it has welcomed through its doors almost every celebrity to have ever visited Rome before the age of rail. Mozart was here with his father Leopold, Charles Dickens complimented the spacious, carpeted quarters with its open fire. The Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph II, Stendhal, Chateaubriand and many more stopped over.

Medici Post House portico, Radicofani  with rings for tethering horses. Known as Osteria Grossa, the Great Hostelry. The coach house door is at the far end.

The Medici Portico, fountain and horse trough from 1603. The Six Balls are the Medici Arms. This was sketched by William Turner in 1828 when he stayed here.

The Medici Hostelry from the road

The Chilly Interior

Medici Hostelry Entrance Hall scaled by scores of celebrated artists, writers, musicians and dandies.

Kitchen and Dining hall

Radicofani stands at 800m and it was notoriously cold in the travelling season of Spring and Autumn. This was the only fireplace other than the Popes’ quarters so very often  ‘milord’ would sleep in front of this fire with his servants rather than in the door-less, unheated rooms upstairs.  An alternative was to sleep in the basement in his coach warmed by the horses.

The Basement was warmer

stables in basement of Medici Hostelry

The Loggia affords a  fine view up to Radicofani town with its castle above.

stairs leading to sleeping quarters

Popes had it better

The Popes’ apartment had a fireplace with a chariot race fresco above, and even doors. Did the Medici ever let it to lesser mortals?  After all, only two popes ever stayed here, Pius VI  and Pius VII (no relation). Pius VI is one of the real people who features in De Sade‘s  1797 novel ‘Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded‘. His audience with Juliette ends in an orgy involving the pope himself.  The Marquis  also stayed here, could they possibly have met? Napoleon, though notoriously anticlerical himself, imprisoned De Sade for the depravities of the novel for the rest of his life.  Casanova  was also a guest.  And was this the fireplace Dickens described?

Popes had ‘mod cons’,  even a bathtub

Pope Pius VII passed a night 3rd November 1809 suffering from a light fever on his way as a French prisoner to crown Napoleon in Paris.

The art critic Brian Sewell made an entertaining documentary ‘Brian Sewell’s Grand Tour’ in which he reads from entertaining actual accounts of the ‘milords’ who stayed here. We forget how tough travelling was before the railway age,  even for the wealthy. Later he also visits Orvieto where he makes some amusing comments within the cathedral. Highly recommended, unless you find his voice too much – somebody said, ‘He even makes the Queen sound common.’

Read Part One – Grand Tour: Radicofani on the Cassia – here

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Pines on the Tuscan coast, Gulf of Baratti (Patrick Nicholas)

How can this be? Known also as the Italian Stone Pine it is recognised all over the world as an Italian icon. So I ordered two for €45 each, my own rather insignificant counter attack against the inexplicably destructive campaign by planners, architects and even artists throughout Italy to neglect them at best, chop them down at worst.

Naples 1970s postcard still on sale

Postcards of the bay of Naples still feature the lonesome pine despite the fact it was felled over 30 years ago and never replaced;

Klimt, Taormina

there is no umbrella pine at the Greco-Roman theatre in Taormina, Sicily as imagined by Klimt;

Turner, Orvieto

the pine in the mid distance of William Turner’s celebrated view of Orvieto is long gone; and most recently of all, every single pine in La Spezia’s Piazza Verdi was felled despite a long campaign waged by local inhabitants. Internationally known art critic Vittorio Sgarbi lent his weight to the protest, while overseas friends of La Spezia railed against this wanton act of destruction. And the final insult, this was in Liguria, the region that has given the world Pesto Genovese, the essential ingredient of which is the exquisite pine nut, the pinolo.

Pine felling in Piazza Verdi, La Spezia, Liguria, May 2014.

The pines were planted during the fascist period and this is often sufficient motive for modern architects and planners to justify their acts of vandalism.  At 80 years old the La Spezia pines were not even middle aged, indeed they had not even reached their prime. After a hundred years or so the umbrella canopy spreads further giving even more shade below. They live nigh on 300 years. The refurbishment of the piazza was thrown open to international competition despite the fact that most citizens were happy with their shady piazza as it was.

Shade-free Piazza Verdi with nano orange trees as it will be.

The competition was won by French conceptual  artist Daniel Buren (aka ‘The Stripe Guy’) with architect G.Vannetti from Florence. It is curious how the ’68 generation of artists (Buren was born 1938), while adhering to a nominally democratising revolution, has found itself trampling on the opinions of the citizenry of provincial cities like La Spezia. The hitherto ignorant and uncultured citizens may in time come to appreciate the conceptual art of Buren with its striped, apparently pointless, primary coloured, two-dimensional arches; modernist obelisks and candy striped fountains, though I suspect their new found enthusiasm for abstract minimalism may be tempered by the minimal shade offered by the nano orange tree.

Orvieto through the pines

In Tuscia, the ancient land of the Etruscans with Orvieto at its heart, the pines have been under attack for years. Avenues of pines planted to shade main roads before the war now have gaps like a street-fighter’s missing teeth. They are never replaced if damaged or diseased, one day in the future my  eleven year old daughter may no longer see the impressive avenue that leads to the top of the hill overlooking Orvieto.

no pines now – Civita di Bagnoregio

The pines that shaded us when we photographed the evocative hill town of Civita di Bagnoregio from nearby Lubriano were ruthlessly, and quite unnecessarily hacked down in 2010 to be replaced by gnomish slow-growing oaks that provide no shade whatsoever. The Stone Pine below which the old tobacconist in the piazza remembers being planted as a youngster was felled in 2011 despite local opposition. The piazza is now empty – and shadeless.

Pine in Bolsena – sadly no more

So Nicholas is on the counter attack. My first effort ended in failure. In 2008 we planted a 5 year old pine beside the road on the hill opposite Orvieto from which Turner painted his landscape. It was cut down 6 months later in September by a local peasant who ranted on about his olives.  So we tried again, this time on the other side of the road on a friend’s land. Our cat Oti was buried beneath it 6 months later.

planting ‘Oti’ 2009 with Allegra Nicholas and growing strong in 2014 – Orvieto in the distance

Since then we have planted three more, one within the city walls of Orvieto, a second just outside and this one ‘Hugo’ (Allegra loves the musical Les Miserables) at Vulci near the Tyrrhenian coast. For years I have badgered the staff at the Archeological site to plant some trees to provide shade for the visitors’ car park – to no avail.

Vulci, Allegra plants ‘Hugo’ (Victor is in Orvieto)

In a few years time I hope to park my car in its ample shade, but I imagine as the only substantial tree in the car park there will be a bit of a fight for the privilege.

Hamadryads are nymphs associated with trees, each one having its own Hamadryad. They are not immortal, they share their destiny with the tree: when the tree sickens and dies, so does the nymph. In my picture below called Hamadryads  one nymph is dying alongside her host, felled by high winds; the other clings to the trunk, safe for the time being, but for how long?

If any Hamadryad espies Daniel Buren passing anywhere near her tree I suggest she knee him as hard as she can in the pinoli.

Hamadryads (2009)

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The Val d’Orcia,  famous and  beloved site of modern photographers and artists in Tuscany,  to the traveller of yore it was just a desolate region to be got through.

For nigh on a thousand years Rome had been the goal of pilgrims following the ancient Via Cassia known in the Middle Ages as the Via Francigena, the road of the Franks.

Val d’Orcia from the ancient Via Cassia, road to Rome

From the mid 17thC until the railway age mainly British and Prussian aristocrats followed the same route on the Grand Tour, a heady mix of culture, adventure and sex that could last months if not years.

The abandoned Medici Post House -horse trough on the left

To this end coaching inns or post-houses were built every 20km or so. The only more or less intact surviving example is the Medici Post House atop a hill south of Sienna on what were the borders of the Papal States at Radicofani.

The dilapidated,melancholic but beautiful facade

The Val d’Orcia may be beloved of modern photographers and artists with its windswept clay hills each one apparently topped by a picturesque farmhouse with a row of cypresses, but to the traveller of yore it was just a desolate region to be got through.

Radicofani in the badlands south of Sienna, a staging post on the Grand Tour

“Such is the region before arriving at Monte Radicofani, a terrible black hill on whose peak we had to lodge for the night. The ascent was extremely arduous and difficult…”  Thomas Gray who accompanied  Horace Walpole through Italy in 1740.

Horse trough with Medici arms: 6 balls like those of the pawnbroker represent banking.

Travellers diaries are full of lurid descriptions of the avidity, deviousness,  unscrupulousness and possibly worst of all for men of their station, impertinence of the ostlers and postilions. What is more they were all armed with long knives and more than ready to use them.

Here is a page from William Turner’s sketchbook of Radicofani with the fountain in the foreground, the town and castle in the background. He appears to have been sitting on the first floor loggia. Sadly the town received a battering in World War II seeing as it was atop a hill from which the entire valley could be surveyed.

The Medici fountain by William Turner 1828.

The Tate Gallery has wrongly described the sketch above as a view of Orvieto. He was in fact on his way to Orvieto where he was to paint one of his most celebrated Italian landscapes.

horse hitching ring

The castle topped hill can be seen from far off in every direction and though it may seem romantic to us, in the past it must have had a dark and sinister air. Apart from anything else this was bandit country and at the very least they were likely to be fleeced by the locals.

Entrance to the stables

The ‘milord’ may have had practically unlimited funds, but travel was tough even for him in those days. A night in a place like the Posta Medicea would have been by our standards uncivilised. It stands at a breezy (in summer) 800m  (2500ft), the rest of the year it was windswept and freezing.

cellar and stables

Rooms had no doors, the windows no glass, bedding was infested with parasites, rooms perishingly cold, the food despicable – all so unpleasant in fact that ‘milord ‘ often preferred to spend the night with his own blankets in his carriage with his horse in the cellars. There is no reason to suppose that other post houses were very different, they varied only in their elevation.

When we went there in 2013 on a Camera Etrusca tour round the Val d’Orcia we found the cellars easy enough to get into, but sadly the rest of the building upstairs is securely locked.

Camera Etrusca photo tours and workshop  has always a day dedicated to see the Val d’Orcia and the area around Sienna. We normally start on Fridays. A small group will be guided by Patrick Nicholas to discover hidden treasure to photograph. Read more on Typical one week photo workshop holiday in Tuscany and Umbria – Italy or contact us to book a custom tour or more info.

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St John the Baptist’s Church, San Lorenzo Vecchio, Lake Bolsena, from afar

Until the 1920s malaria was the scourge of the Italy. Often entire communities were decimated because the origins of the disease were unknown. The name Malaria comes from the belief that bad air (lit. mal aria) was the cause. In English it was commonly called the Ague.

Church of San Lorenzo Vecchio

One solution was to move the town away from the pestilential air to higher ground, often to a healthy area called piano sano, the healthy plateau.   In the XVIII century much of the lakeside town of San Lorenzo was demolished, its stones transported to the heights above Lake Bolsena and re-erected as San Lorenzo Nuovo with an octagonal piazza. The church of St John the Baptist, however, was spared, though its roof has fallen in.

A mournful view of the church of St John the Baptist

The old town lay astride the pilgrims’ road to Rome known as the Via Francigena, the Frankish Road, which until the Reformation led all the way from Canterbury.

Surviving fresco

The church designed by Pietro Tartarino, and completed in 1590 is unusual. It is octagonal, and occupies a site once sacred to the Etruscan and  for whom Lake Bolsena was the centre of their cult, the Omphalos, the navel of their world. The XVIII century piazza in San Lorenzo Nuovo is also octagonal.

St John the Baptist’s church

Catholic miracles abound in places where the old religion proved particularly hard to eradicate. Nearby Bolsena has not one , but two miracles associated with the town, a sign that adherence to the old religion was particularly obdurate. This church in Val di Lago, close by the Etruscan city of Tyre, may mark the site of the miracle of Santa Cristina. Though not the case here, a church raised on the site of a miraculous defeat of paganism is often dedicated to St Michael and the pagan power is represented as a dragon. However, the octagonal shape, the preferred form of Templar churches, could be significant.

Chancel of St John’s church with surviving roof

The roof over the chancel has survived, as have some frescoes and even some stucco sculpture. There even seems to be some blast damage, a reminder that the war passed through here in 1944. All in all the church of San Lorenzo Vecchio is a miracle in itself, of survival.

The charm of the place lies in its desolate remoteness among the swamps near Lake Bolsena. However a quite useless fence was erected in 2012, and mock cast-iron lamp-posts were scattered about. A case of European Union largesse being sprinkled  on ostensibly worthy projects perhaps? It would not surprise me if some over enthused local politician were to raise European Union funds to erect a concrete roof, re-stucco the building and spray paint it his mistresses’ favourite colour of tasteful pork pink. It would not be the first time.

St John the Baptist’s has a lugubrious beauty in winter

May Patrick Nicholas’ photographic workshop: Tuscany, Orvieto, Lake Bolsena and Barabbata festival.

May festival at Lake Bolsena, Italy

 Start the summer with Camera Etrusca’s Barabbata Festival Workshop with led by patrick Nicholas. Held every year on May 14 on the shores of Lake Bolsena. This joyous festival with pagan origins has colourful floats drawn by men and animals through the picturesque fishing village (the womenfolk just cast blossom from the balconies) is held to mark the beginning of summer.
As usual we would like to offer a discount to all the people that want to start the summer season with us.

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Orso Orsini was a prince of wild ways. Wayward brother of the cultured condottiero Niccolò, he married the beautiful Eleanora degli Atti di Morlupo, whose name was long but her life short. He strangled her in a fit of unfounded jealousy in 1575 on the bridge outside Pitigliano and threw her body into the ravine.

Bower sculpted from the volcanic rock

The recently completed Parco Orsini  thus came to be known as the lugubrious Parco degli Strozzoni, Stranglers Park.

Crumbling thrones overlooking the valley in the Orsini Park, Pitigliano.

And yet the park had been planned as a place of quiet contemplation, a ‘locus amoenus’ along the lines of the nearby  Bosco Sacro or Sacred Wood of Bomarzo (below), built about the same time in 1552.

Bomarzo, “Ogni Pensiero Vola” (“Every Thought Flies”, but games, even hide and seek, picnics, photography – all forbidden)

This had been laid out with grotesque and massive sculpture on the orders of Vicino Orsini, a distant cousin of Orso and Niccolò. Vicino had had the garden designed on Hermetic principles by Pirro Ligorio,

Bomarzo

architect of genius (he was responsible for the water works at Villa Este in Tivoli and was also the first Italian to design buildings specifically to resist earthquakes).

The sculpture was designed to amaze, and it still does though the garden is not what it was and the water element is now completely missing; Bomarzo also has the stroppiest, most belligerent and gratuitously discourteous custodians I have ever encountered, anywhere. Bomarzo is now a major tourist attraction visited by the likes of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalì and Antonioni. It even featured in  film version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

not perhaps what you might think but the remains of a reclining goddess

Parco Orsini on the other hand has no custodians at all, is difficult to find and what is more the statuary is largely overgrown, crumbling and un-cared for – it is just like stumbling upon an enchanted secret garden.

the reclining goddess from the other side

The statue of the Orsini family in Pitigliano, Tuscany.

Orso Orsini who quite apart from strangling his luckless wife also had a neighbour of his Galeazzo Farnese murdered during a hunting party. He got his comeuppance when he was himself slain on a bridge by Prospero Colonna.

The model is trying the pose for  “Carpe Diem” on one of the several thrones looking over the Lente valley

At the end of the escarpment there is a belvedere carved out of the rock with a fine view across the Lente Valley towards Sorano. I have used this enchanted wood in two my pictures  This Autumn Evening and Carpe Diem (in which you may notice a transposed Orsini bear).

an out-take from the This Autumn Evening shoot

Rather optimistically the local municipality, at considerable expense, built a recreation area with scores of wooden picnic tables. However in true municipal style they neglected to create access or a parking area, so now it is as overgrown, out of sight and unknown as the Orsini Park itself – which does not exactly break my heart.

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Cycladic statue

The interior was frescoed, a semi circle of  the apostles, but these sadly were brutally hacked off  (you can see the signs above the arch) and sold illegally in the 1960s. Thankfully they were later recovered and they are now in the Ischia di Castro Museum.
Some frescoes survive mainly over the alter. These manifest the close ties between the ancient church and the popular beliefs still prevalent in the Italian countryside.
Worship is an inaccurate word for the pagan rites that took place here, it implies adoration of an omnipotent God whereas the rituals that the Etruscans and others practised were more about celebrating oneness with nature and the cosmos. The deities could have been several: Turan, the Etruscan Venus; Minerva; or the male deity Fufluns, the Etruscan Bacchus. Bacchanalia are usually associated with the Romans (and parties organised by the Italian Prime Minister) but similar rites are  common to all antique cultures and survive even today in aboriginal peoples.

curious (for a Christian church) frescoes above the altar

In pre-Christian Italy it was common practise to hold rites in a Sacred Grove. Making music was integral: drums, tambourines, castanets, pipes, trumpets and dancing to the point of ecstasy. Singing too, even yelling were part of the ritual. The ancient world was much darker and almost silent by modern standards – and a lot more dangerous; thus the sense of hearing would have had a much greater importance in respect to sight. A place like the sacred glade would have been chosen for magical rights because of its extraordinary acoustics.

cascade from above

Scientists in the field of archeo-acoustics from Princeton University have recently found that the resonance found in caves, grottoes and amphitheatres like Stonehenge have a  frequency of 110 Hz which in turn has an effect on the left hemisphere of the brain, damping it and causing an asymmetry in the pre-fontal cortex leading to a predominance of the right side. The result is a diminution of the centres of language and a heightening of the emotions. This would have strengthened the emotional charge of those participating in mystical ceremonies.   If alcohol and possibly other drugs were added to the alchemy then it is easy to imagine participants becoming entranced and feeling they were passing from one dimension to another.

I have shot a number of pictures in the sacred glade, for example Nacht und Träume
and Bacchanalia

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“Sunrise glowed red as I climbed along the gorge; when I reached the grove, I saw the altar slab all scattered with brightness, like the harper’s robe. I put down my load, and prayed to Apollo.”

Poggio Conte will appear immediately familiar to anyone who has read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, a novel based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which she describes in detail a Sacred Glade.

The Sacred Glade, the cliff church is just visible top left.

Poggio Conte is in a remote corner of northern Latium on the borders of Tuscany.

It is quicker……………. and easier in the Land Rover

Most visitors must leave their cars by the road (where the signpost is usually absent) about 5km from the site, walk along the Fiora valley through a bucolic idyl of grazing cattle amongst scarlet poppies.

The last stretch before the wood, the glade is among the trees ahead beneath the cliff

With the Land Rover we can however get much closer before having to leave the vehicle to follow a footpath along a cutting through the cliffs. As we approach the glade we begin to hear an enchanting sound, the tinkle of water cascading onto a blue-black pointed rock.

Sacred Glade cascade

There are Etruscan tombs cut into the cliffs though most have disappeared as the sides of the ravine have collapsed over millennia. However, the cliff church though losing it’s portal to erosion by flood-waters, has survived in the cliff above the concave dell.

Etruscan tombs in the ravine leading to the glade.

Patrick Nicholas has used this location in several of his pictures in the Belle series , for example Lilith.

More about the sacred glade and the hermitage church of San Colomba in the next blog coming up soon.

This is one of the several Photo excursion location that we normally include in our photo workshops and photo tours .

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Much of what is now known as northern Latium north of Rome on the borders of Tuscany was until the 1930s a veritable wilderness.

The cliff dwellings of Ripatonna on the Tuscan Latium marches, a veritable wilderness until fairly recently.

Saracen pirates had scourged the area and malaria had done the rest.

The Roman single span bridge over the river Fiora. The arch, an Etruscan invention, is still standing with absolutely no maintenance.

Not surprisingly the region was infested with bandits and outlaws, but also with hermits, lepers, outcasts, monks and nuns. Many of latter led a troglodyte existence hollowing out dwellings in the soft tufa cliffs along the river Fiora.

a picnic in the Selva Lamone forest before we set off.

Ripatonna Cicognina was inhabited by a community of about 200  between XV and XVII centuries. There was a church which once had frescoes by the Sienna School depicting Sant’Antonio Abate, the first Christian hermit.

Archana from Bangalore photographs the interior which still has most of its plaster  embellished by generations of graffiti.

It is a steep but not a hard climb up to the cliff dwelling. The tufa volcanic rock is soft and easy to excavate but then oxidises and hardens, an ideal building material.

The hermitage probably is an enlargement of an Etruscan necropolis going back about 2500 years.

A great place for kids to explore

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Lake Albano from Castel Gandolfo. You wouldn’t believe that a place like the Alban Hills could be just 20kms from the centre of beautiful, enchanting, but chaotic Rome

As a child Piranesi fired my imagination like no other artist. I dreamed of finding a Roman crypto-portico at the bottom of my granny’s garden, his imaginary prisons unsettled my nights, his overgrown dark towers and gloomy grottoes encouraged my own voyage to Italy, his  colossal Roman ruins  inspired my photography.

Piranesi: Roman Tunnel Lake Albano

Piranesi moved art forward from Renaissance adoration of the classical to a baroque fascination with creating mood and theatrical effect. Piranesi’s perspective is unreal, his scale deliberately deceitful, and like a cinema poster designer in Hollywood’s golden age he sought to create gasps from his audience.

Piranesi’s print of the entrance Tunnel under Castel Gandolfo

One might be excused in thinking that the Caracalla Baths are anyway so huge that Piranesi is guilty of gilding the lily, yet many of his drawings succeed in exciting our curiosity precisely because he cheats.

The locked low door to the great court. We crawled in under the road.

Whilst living in Castelgandolfo over ten years ago I set out to find the Emissario of Lake Albano after seeing Piranesi’s engraving which reminded me of a flooded Egyptian temple.

The reality. Water used to flow from lake Albano (left) into the tunnel the other side of the walled court (photo below) on the right.

The tunnel was constructed by Etruscan hydraulic engineers for the Roman Republic starting in 398 BC to drain lake Albano which otherwise on occasion overflowed with disastrous results for the Roman Campagna. Livy describes the work as taking place during the siege of Veio and required the labour of 30,000 slaves tunnelling from either end. It is 1.2km or nearly a mile long.

The courtyard. The entrance to the 1.2km long tunnel is clearly visible

I managed to divine the curtain wall which concealed the entrance to the tunnel from the lake with a low door next to which was a Latin inscription indicating the entrance to the Emissary;  it was locked.

The ‘Egyptian’ columns

However a road runs along the lake shore and under the bridge was the former sluice gate, now high and dry as the lake level has unaccountably dropped over the last 20 years. It is possible to walk through at a crouch and though one can stand at a certain point I hardly recognised the Egyptian pylons, reduced as they were to Lilliputian scale. How had I been conned? Piranesi has included tiny figures, a fisherman and a cavorting nymph, a brilliant trick!

The entrance to the 1.2km long tunnel

Camera Etrusca explored the Roman tunnel of Lake Albano as part of a Rome weekend workshop in April 2012

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