Sacro Bosco: Welcome to the Park of the Monsters

"Holy" and "monster" don't really go together. And yet both meet in a hidden valley north of Rome.

Overgrown with moss and forgotten by time – the "Holy Forest", north of Rome, has nothing sacred about it. Eerie grimaces made of stone and weathered fabulous figures give many visitors a queasy feeling. They couldn't scare the legendary artist Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). He was inspired by the monster forest for one of his paintings.

Vicino Orsini, a nobleman from the 16th century, had the sculpture park laid out in memory of his late wife Giulia Farnese. Over the years more and more wondrous beings and structures were added. To this day, they have puzzled researchers and historians. What did the stonemasons of the "Casa Pendente" (Eng. Crooked house) think? What is the head of the sea god Glaucus and an elephant with a tower on his back doing in a park? Visitors can come up with their own answers.

Between gods and mythical creatures

On an area of ​​two square kilometers, the path leads past a woman on a turtle until visitors further north through the mouth of the Orcus into a dark chamber. In 1938 the Spanish painter, writer and sculptor Salvador Dalí visited the "Sacro Bosco". Some motifs, such as the elephant, reappear in his painting "The Temptation of Saint Anthony". This mystical world should have pleased the master of surrealism.

The entire forest of sculptures is criss-crossed with inscriptions that up to now could only be guessed at. Some want to have found allusions from the "Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri. Others recognize quotations from Petrarch's sonnet "Canzoniere". Whatever the wondrous beings with their inscriptions are supposed to tell us. Anyone who wants to visit the park (post-corona) will definitely be amazed – and maybe even shudder a bit.

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