Some of my favourite views of Rome

7: The Villa Borghese and the Pincian Hill at dusk

I have spoken here many times of my enthusiasm for that slightly dusty, languidly weary, faded grandeur which I always think of as Gattopardian, from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel about the crumbling of the aristocracy in Risorgimento Sicily. In my recent post about the Casino dell’Aurora Ludovisi, a last enclave of such aristocratic grandeur beached behind high walls amid the grandest expression of the charmless and businesslike sventramenti Umbertini (literally the urban eviscerations of the city during the reign of Umberto I), I mentioned that in antiquity a vast swathe on the outskirts of Rome had been occupied by the Gardens of Sallust.

The Horti Sallustiani once stretched—gardens, pavilions, parkland, and nymphaea—across part of the Pincian Hill to the Quirinal. His was not the only such complex to occupy part of this hill beyond the seven of Rome’s foundation; certainly Lucullus also had gardens here, which one can imagine were, well, positively Lucullan. Incidentally, the arrival of cherries and apricots in Italy—and hence elsewhere in Europe—can be credited to Lucullus, following his victory at Pontus over Mithradates VI which is the sort of fact I love.

The name we know the hill by today comes from the Mons Pincius, which refers to the Pincii family who occupied an extravagant garden complex in the fourth century, long after Sallust and Lucullus. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the revival of such horti was a very deliberate allusion to the erudite citation of antiquity by folk such as Cardinal Scipione Borghese; his name redolent of the triumphs of Rome’s ancient past. Scipione’s extraordinary villa complex underwent a swathe of architectural and horticultural modifications following changing tastes in the early nineteenth century and was favoured by the aristocracy and the burgeoning haute bourgeoisie of Roman society.

When John Keats arrived in Rome in 1820, already sickening with tuberculosis and weakened by the journey which was to have brought him to warmer climes but which had proven so long and torturous that he only arrived in the depths of November, every bit as dank in Rome as Hampstead, his only foray outwith the walls of the apartment his friend Joseph Severn had rented on the Spanish Steps was a carriage ride to the terrace of the Pincio.

A year after poor Keats’ death an obelisk dedicated to Antinous, lover of the Emperor Hadrian, a Romantic hero also doomed to an early and tragic death was erected on the hill by Pius VII just behind where I stood as I took the above photograph. Its ersatz hieroglyphs allude to the deification of Antinous, and the dedication of Antinoopolis on the banks of the Nile where he drowned, perhaps pushed by a jealous rival.

Since 1904 Villa Borghese has been a public park, and the Pincian Hill home to busts of illustrious Italians ancient and modern chosen in the spirit of the Risorgimento: Caesar and Cavour; Petrarch and Pascoli; Machiavelli and Manzoni.

As I took myself on a lackadaisical trot through the Villa Borghese at dusk the other day the bust of Giacomo Leopardi particularly caught my eye. He was looking suitably mournful against a skyline of heroic pines in the golden light of the setting sun. It brought to mind a poem he wrote not long before his untimely death aged thirty-eight during an epidemic of cholera at Naples; a suitably Romantic demise.