Villa Farnese site features

The Villa Farnese stands directly above the town of Caprarola and dominates everything around it -- a massive block of reddish gold stone on a five-sided plan, with buttresses carrying the upper floors, looking out to the Monte Cimini, a range of densely wooded volcanic hills. It was never a villa in the agricultural or the pleasure sense. As the centrepiece of the Farnese holdings it was an expression of family power, and it reads as one.

The approach

You come at it along the town's main street, which is aimed at the building, to a piazza from which stairs climb a sequence of terraces. The first is the subterranean basement, excavated out of the tuff and ringed by steep curving steps: it worked as a carriage entrance in bad weather, and inside it a massive central column stands among buttresses and retaining walls. From outside, large heavily grilled doors in rusticated walls look exactly like the guardrooms of a fortress, which is the point. Above them a curved balustraded double stairway leads up to the next terrace, and a formal double staircase from there to the principal entrance.

That entrance is on the Piano dei Prelati, a bastion-like floor that reads in elevation as a second ground floor -- rusticated, its main door a severe arch with three windows to each side, the facade stopped at both ends by massive solid corner projections. Above it the double-height piano nobile breaks the severity with five huge arched windows over the front door, and above that two more floors for gentlefolk with servants above them, their windows divided by rusticated pilasters in dressed stone.

The courtyard

Inside the pentagon is a circle. The galleried court has paired Ionic columns flanking niches that hold busts of the Roman emperors, above a rusticated arcade -- a reworking of Bramante's scheme for the House of Raphael in the Borgo at Rome, with a second Bramantesque touch in the entablature, which breaks forward over each column to link them above while they stand on separate bases. The interior loggia formed by the arcade is frescoed with Raphaelesque grotesques in the manner of the Vatican Logge. Five spiral staircases around the courtyard reach the gallery and the upper floors.

The piano nobile

The main rooms are here, arranged around a large central loggia -- now glazed in -- looking down over the town, its main street and the country beyond. That hall is the Room of Hercules, named for its frescoes, used as a summer dining hall, with a grotto-like fountain and sculpture at one end. A circular room opens on either side of it: one the chapel, the other the Scala Regia, a spiral of steps carried on paired Ionic columns rising through three floors and frescoed by Antonio Tempesta.

Two grand apartments, matched symmetrically in plan, complete the ring around the courtyard. Each runs five rooms, starting with the largest reception hall nearest the entrance and getting smaller and more private as it goes -- bedroom, wardrobe, studiolo at the northern end. That sequence became standard in the seventeenth century as the Baroque state apartment; here it is being worked out. Their orientations divide the year and the mind: the east, or summer, apartment is associated with the active life and the west, or winter, range with the contemplative. Each has its own matching parterre garden, reached by a bridge across the moat and cut into the hillslope.

The circular courtyard

Paired Ionic columns flanking niches of Roman imperial busts above a rusticated arcade, reworking Bramante's House of Raphael in the Borgo. The entablature breaks forward over each column, tying them together at the top while their bases stay separate -- a second borrowing from Bramante, and the detail that makes the colonnade read as one object rather than a row.

The Scala Regia

Frescoed by Antonio Tempesta: a spiral staircase on paired Ionic columns climbing through three floors, in one of the two circular rooms that flank the great loggia. It is the most important of the five spiral stairs set around the courtyard.

The Sala del Mappamondo

The Room of the World Map, in the contemplative winter suite: the whole known world as it stood in 1574, when the frescoes were finished. Overhead the vault carries the celestial spheres and the constellations of the zodiac, so the room sets the mapped earth under the mapped sky.

The Sala dei Fasti Farnesiani

The Room of Farnese Deeds, painted by the brothers Taddeo and Federico Zuccari, showing the family at their most glorious moments from floor to coffered ceiling. The iconographic programme for the villa's frescoes was worked out by the humanists of the cardinal's court, notably his secretary Annibale Caro, and the cycles run to the exploits of Alexander the Great alongside those of the Farnese.

The Room of Hercules

The great central loggia on the piano nobile, now glazed, used as a summer dining hall and named for its frescoes, with a grotto-like fountain and sculpture at one end and a view down the town's main street.

The moat and the three drawbridges

The fortress theme that the foundations began is carried right through the finished building: a moat surrounds the villa, crossed by three drawbridges, and the two hillside gardens are reached over it from the apartments on the piano nobile.

The casino and its water-staircase

At the end of a walk through chestnut woods, in the giardino segreto: a small habitable summerhouse with two loggias for eating outdoors, probably to designs by Giacomo del Duca with later alterations by Girolamo Rainaldi. Stairs climb between heavily rusticated grotto walls on either side of a catena d'acqua, a cascaded rill running down to a stone basin; at the top, in an oval space, two large reclining river gods flank a central vase fountain, and stairs built into the oval walls lead up to a parterre terrace lined with stone herms and cypresses.