encountered in a house. The palace is so complex that
it has been the subject of a hundred Ph.D. dissertations.
Scholars have devoted lifetimes to the study of Caprarola,
returning again and again with new insight.
These are my own.
Caprarola, in the Ciminian hills one and
half hours north or Rome, seems a place
earthbound, grounded in the mineral, yet
aspiring to the heavenly in its architecture,
decoration, iconography and, quite simply,
its location. The palace is built into a hillside
at the wide end of a ridge, the upper part
of the town stretching below in a downhill
orientation, with ravines on either side. The
basement and sub-basement, carved out
of bedrock, approximate the bowels of the
earth, its round courtyard above, open to
the sky, set within a massive pentagonal
structure, seemingly a fitting silo for a
shuttle to the heavens.
Mise en scene over the millennia of both
Hercules and the Etruscans and the ebb
and flow of Roman power, the forest,
hills and sacred Lake Vico in Caprarola's
precincts speak to the great palace's
historical and spiritual antecedents. The
very name Caprarola derives from the goat
and goat herding, with, in all probability,
there once being in ancient times an altar
to the goat in the vicinity, bespeaking pagan origins.
Centrally situated in Caprarola's palace and garden plan,
at an unmistakably important locale, the great Cardinal
HYLAND
