Bomarzo

Bomarzo sits on a lava spur of the Monti Cimini, fifteen kilometers east of Viterbo, on the wooded edge of the Tuscia. The village is small and medieval, dominated by the palazzo above it, its lanes stepping down to a lower piazza. The wooded valley below holds the reason most people come: the Sacro Bosco, also called the Parco dei Mostri, designed for Vicino Orsini's garden by Pirro Ligorio, with sculptures attributed to Simone Moschino.

The garden was abandoned for centuries before the Bettini family restored it in the 1950s; Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau visited in the 20th century, drawn by the same strangeness that had emptied the place out. What the town adds up to is a pairing of restraint and excess set close together: a modest hill village and medieval rocca standing over a valley where one man built monsters in stone because ordinary grief needed no ordinary monument.