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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A fallen woman flying on a devil’s back, one of the images by Signorelli that so stimulated Freud

Freud, Orvieto and Signorelli

 Freud, Orvieto, Signorelli: the Renaissance frescoes by Luca Signorelli had a profound effect upon Freud. In the entrance hall of Freud’s last home in London, on the right, is a picture of Tivoli, a reminder that Italy was his favourite holiday destination and his spiritual home.

Gardens of Villa Este, Tivoli

50 years after his death in London a collection of black and white Italian postcards was found in a drawer. Purchased during his first of three visits to Orvieto in 1897 they depict frescoes by Luca Signorelli from the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto cathedral. His encounter with the Renaissance artist from Cortona had a profound effect upon him that profoundly influenced his life and work.

When Freud arrived in Orvieto 120 years ago in 1897 he was going through a turbulent period for several reasons: he was mourning his father who had died in December; partly as a result of this he was in the process of jettisoning his conclusion that hysteria was caused by paternal seduction in childhood turning instead towards the idea of infant sexuality; curiously, the man who sought the source of almost everything in sex had recently set out on a life of celibacy after siring six children in nine years.  Furthermore, two years before he had embarked upon self analysis, then an uncharted journey into the unknown, and in 1896 coined the term psychoanalysis.

Orvieto Duomo and Stars of David

The wonders that Freud saw when he walked into the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto Cathedral. The Fra Angelico frescoes on the ceiling, the Signorelli on the walls.

The frescoing of the walls was undertaken by Luca Signorelli in 1499 aged about 54. Signorelli’s vision is apocalyptic.

The Antichrist panel left and the Elect in paradise right. Fra Angelico frescoes above on the vaulted ceiling.

On the left is the preaching of the Antichrist followed by the elect cavorting, largely naked, in paradise.

Antichrist left and the Elect in Paradise right. Bottom left corner are Signorelli himself left with hat and Fra Angelico behind, both in black.

Other walls and lunettes show scenes of angels smiting the ungodly with death rays – in fact there is a lot of smiting going on all over the chapel, a veritable orgy of sex and violence.

the wicked smitten by death rays from on high

On the wall opposite are two tableau, both a riot of eroticism and naked flesh, not perhaps what what one would expect in a church, the damned thrown into inferno by devils followed by the saved hauling themselves up from their graves to eternal life.

The damned thrown into hell.

The resurrection of the dead

The tableau that seems to have exerted the greatest fascination upon Freud is the Antichrist. An unusual subject, it was commissioned by the powerful Monaldeschi, a Guelf family, always close to the papacy and in opposition to the Ghibellines who supported the Emperor; the scene is a polemic against heresy, especially the Cathars who had been particularly bothersome in Orvieto, but also against Jews.

The devil whispers to Antichrist, probably based on Savonarola. On left the usurious Jew bribes a blonde.

Freud had been aware of antisemitism since his childhood in Moravia when his father had told his young son that he had humbly turned the other cheek when accosted by an aggressive antisemite on the street. Ever since, Freud had admired more martial father-figures like Cromwell, Hannibal and significantly, Moses.

A spectator watches the mayhem above. He is surrounded by ‘grotesques’, painted just after the recent discovery of the grottoes of Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome.

The Catholic Church at the time saw Jews not merely as infidels, but Jesus-killing heretics. Freud, who was suffering emotional and intellectual turmoil after his father’s death, stood surrounded by Signorelli’s apocalyptic maelstrom and saw the son, Christ, effectively slaying the father, Judaism.

A smitten Dante figure

Self-portrait of Luca Signorelli surrounded by mayhem looks out of the frame. Behind him stands Fra Angelico or perhaps not – it could be the Archdeacon.

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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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This dream was to come true when my wife and I moved to Castel Gandolfo in 2002. We rented a flat in the grounds of a villa once owned by Visconti, bought when he was working on his masterpiece The Leopard  in 1962.

Diana’s Baths or The Nymphaeum of Bergantino, Castelgandolfo

One day Lucia told me she had discovered a large cave in the cliff running along the edge of Lake Albano full of garden rubbish. When we investigated further we made out amongst the bushes another bigger opening enclosed by wall with a rusty gate. This was the Nymphaeum of Bergantino built on the orders of Domitian in the grounds of his vast palace now in the gardens of the pope’s summer palace of Castel Gandolfo. The gate was unlocked and I was amazed by what I saw within. The arch is 17 metres across at the opening.

Piranesi Diana baths, Castelgandolfo Rome

Domitian was fond of a barbaric form of gladiatorial entertainment known as the Naumachia, or mock naval battles involving real combatants and it may be that Domitian watched from the shelter of the nymphaeum.
Piranesi drew the Nymphaeum in his inimitable manner in 1762 with nano figures to exaggerate the size of the arch.

Excavations in 1841 revealed mosaics of a gorgon and of Diana drawn in a chariot by four tritons as well as the remains of a marble sculpture of Ulysses slaying the Cyclops. None of which remain on site but are to be found in the private chambers of the pontifical palace. The marble walls and other sculptures disappeared in antiquity.

niches for statues

The Baths of Diana are not open to the public but you can visit them on a Camera Etrusca workshop in Rome or you can contact www.diakronica.it who organise guided visits.

I have recently shot one of my Belle pictures entitled Anima Mundi in this unique location which I will post soon in November 2013 on www.photonicholas.com

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Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard (written in Stoke Poges)

The drift from the land from the 1950s onward has left many Italian villages without any of their original families, resulting in abandoned ‘campo santi’, the village cemeteries. Chianti has become gentrified and just as Gray’s farming village of Stoke Poges has become the abode of bankers and stockbrokers, mean Chianti cottages are now owned by wealthy Florentines as holiday homes, or more commonly foreigners – the Italians do not call this area Chiantishire for nothing.

The cypress avenue in Castellina in Chianti (SI)

I came across this cemetery near Castellina in Chianti and only spotted it because the oak wood around had been thinned for firewood. In fact it was the cypress avenue I spotted first. The cypress has symbolised mourning since its branches were used to garland statues of Pluto, god of the underworld.

Cemetery gate with the funerary chapel at the end

A campo santo is melancholy at the best of times, but one that has no one left to visit it, to tend the graves, to leave flowers, not even on occasion of the day of ‘i morti’, All Hallows, when Italians traditionally return to the graveyard of their forefathers, especially so.

Tin wreaths inside the chapel

In the middle of the chapel floor is the disk that covers the charnel chamber where the bones from the campo santo outside would have been  brought in to release space.

Charnel house

I lifted the lid to reveal chamber below. As Hamlet said while musing on Yorick’s skull in the graveyard “….to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come”

In a cathedral or important church it cost more to be buried within the church, dearer still in the chancel near the saint’s relics before the altar: thus the expression ‘the stinking rich’.

In the cemetery I found the mournful memorial to Valeria Baroncelli, beside a posy of faded plastic flowers.

The stone says she died aged only 17 after a long and pitiful illness on 5th November 1940. I reflected that it would be quite selfish of me to dread my own death after a comparatively long, fruitful and interesting life when Valeria had been taken so young.

Valeria Baroncelli’s ceramic ‘santino’ or momento mori portrait

She was from a family of obscure Chianti  rustics but I find her image hauntingly beautiful. As I wrote this last line I heard quite by chance Dowland’s ‘Lachrimae’ on the radio.

Contact me for a guided photo tour round Tuscany and its hidden treasure

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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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Fading fresco in Diana Temple, Nemi, Rome

Sometimes I come across a place purely by chance, sometimes I have been tipped off by a local, sometimes because I have read about it and have made a search.

I will endeavour to post articles about a wide variety of places, some very humble, others so noteworthy one wonders how they could possible have fallen into virtual oblivion. All have in common that they have fallen out of sight and consequently out of mind.

Temple of Diana, Nemi

Walls of Diana Temple

The Alban Hills national park, although nowadays practically a Roman suburb, is an area of wild natural beauty, deep crater lakes, forests, Renaissance villas and ancient ruins. Ten years ago my daughter was born in Genzano above Lake Nemi, and the evening before her birth I sat amongst the perfumed yellow broom watching the sun set a hundred metres or so above the ruins of the Temple dedicated to Diana, goddess of the hunt, but also child birth.

Turner’s ‘Golden Bough’ showing Lake Nemi

The scene was reminiscent of William Turner’s celebrated painting, The Golden Bough, painted probably from a spot very close to where I sat and contemplated the most life changing event of my life and the beginning of a new one. The event that Turner depicts relates how Aeneas breaks the golden bough in order to guide him into Hades to find his Father. Nemi is a place that almost overpowers one with atavistic emotion.

Sir James Frazer the father of anthropology started the long intellectual and scientific journey that was his magnum opus The Golden Bough from the ruins of Diana’s temple. The first chapter of which opens thus:

Who does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough?  The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palace whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.

Inner sanctum, temple of Vesta , Nemi, Rome

Given the fame of Diana herself and the importance and wide reaching effect that Frazer’s book had on scientists, artists, writers and philosophers in the 20th century you would think that the well excavated ruins of the temple would be something of a shrine and tourist attraction. Sadly this is not the case.

Nemi castle on the hill overlooking the temples ruins.

The site is not indicated, the path overgrown and the entrance gate broken open. The information boards so faded as to be illegible.

crumbling mosaics

From the photographer’s point of view the remains of the temple complex are photogenic, there is an air of Piranesi melancholy about the place and yet if only there was a museum with artefacts found on the site, or copies of the statues, or an explanation of the macabre story that Frazer relates in the opening chapter of his book, or just a local farmer selling confections of locally collected wild strawberries and chilled white wine from under an umbrella pine, how much fuller the experience would be.

Come and explore Diana’s temple in Nemi, search for the Golden Bough with a Camera Etrusca photo trip to the Alban Hills on the outskirts of Rome. 

cripto-portico in Nemi, Rome.

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