Tarquinia, and Il Giardino dei Tarocchi

 Tarquinia, Italia

 

13 October, 2024

 

This was a full-day excursion, broken into two parts.  We drove past part of a Roman aqueduct – you can see a bit of reflection as I took these photos through the bus window.  SO thrilling to see pieces of 2000 or so year old architecture, still standing!  The Romans certainly knew how to engineer buildings to last!

 

Tarquinia is one of those ancient-to-modern cities that are all over Italy.  It’s a port city, almost on the Tyrrhenian Sea, a bit north of Rome.  The city dates back to roughly the 8^th century BCE, when the Etruscan culture flourished in the Italian peninsula.

 

One of the big features of Tarquinia is the necropolis, the ancient Etruscan cemetery.  Wealthy or important Etruscans were buried in underground tombs carved into the bedrock, with small buildings atop the tombs.  Some people in our group hiked up to the necropolis, while the rest of us went to the huge museum of Etruscan art.

 

I was in the second group.  The National Archaeological Museum of Tarquinia is housed in the 15^th century Palazzo Vitelleschi – commissioned in 1436 by Cardinal G. Vitelleschi.  (The church hierarchy was led by wealthy princes and minor royalty or nobles.)  It’s a gorgeous building with colonnades and porticos and arches, graceful and airy.  And chockful of sarcophagi and frescoes from the Etruscan tombs.

 

We couldn’t take photos inside the museum because, well, those are the rules for most museums around the world.  Flash photos are bad for the art, there are copyrights on much of the art, and the museums make money by selling the images on postcards and in books and such.  Here’s the city’s website, which features some of what is housed at this museum:  https://tarquiniaturismo.com/national-archaeological-museum-tarquinia/?lang=en

 

Most of the sarcophagi are about the size of a modern coffin, and carved from tuff (in Italian, tuffa).  Tuff is one of those odd rocks, being basically volcanic ash that was compressed over eons and mixed with rain or groundwater, so it’s solid but still fairly porous and easy to carve.  It also is a conglomerate, meaning there are all sorts of other tiny to small rocks mixed in with all the ash.  Tuff is common in volcanic regions like Italy, and is also the rock used for the giant statues (moai) for which Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is so famous.

 

Most of the sarcophagi had a statue of the person carved on the slab lid that closed the body inside.  It was interesting how realistic these statues were, with the person semi-reclining.  We noticed each figure either held a carved round dish sort of thing, or there might be one next to the statue.  I sketched a picture and asked the people working in the museum what it was; turned out that food was placed on that dish, so that the deceased would have food to sustain them as they moved into the afterworld, or next life, or however the Etruscans thought of death.

 

There were both women and men figures, though predominantly men who were government officials.  Some more modern sarcophagi (as in only 2000 years old instead of 3500 years old) had writing carved in the sides, often the name of the person.  A few even had frescoes painted on the sides!

 

My favorite part, however, was upstairs, where several of the tombs had been dismantled and the frescoes were installed in the museum.  SO gorgeous!  These frescoes covered all four walls as well as the peaked ceiling of the tombs, and represent Etruscan life.  There are paintings of people playing musical instruments, or sitting at a table eating, even participating in sports!  Most of the colors are still bright, even after all these years!  (Fresco is ground natural pigments painted on wet plaster.  The plaster crystalizes over the pigment as it dries, so it preserves the color and image better than paint on canvas or wood.)

 

Some of the frescoes include demons or monsters, perhaps part of what was imagined as being in the after world.  The ceilings were usually geometric shapes, vaguely like a tiled roof perhaps.  At least, that’s sort of what it looked like to me.

 

The whole museum was fascinating, and definitely worth a visit!

 

Edmund, the school’s on-site director, had made a reservation for us at a seafood restaurant.  So after we finished a slow wander through the museum, we headed over there for a delicious lunch.  We had time for a quick gelato, then our bus was ready to take us to our next stop.

 

 

Il Giardino dei Tarocchi – Tarot Garden

 

Niki de St. Phaille was a French fashion model, but so much more.  She was born in 1930, near Paris, and led an extremely colorful life.  Much of her modelling occurred during her teen years; she posed for covers of Vogue as well as Life magazine.  While in college, she studied art.  She married young (age eighteen), had several children, rejected the traditional gender roles of wife and mother, and opted to pursue art as her career.

 

While living in Spain in her 20s, she visited Barcelona and was clearly affected by the sculpture and architecture of Antonia Gaudi.  Ms. St. Phaille eventually decided to create her own garden similar to Gaudi’s Parc Güell, although her images are based on the figures in tarot cards.  She bought land some 100 km (60 miles) northwest of Rome, set up a ceramics studio, and designed her garden.  Il Giardino dei Tarocchi, the Tarot Garden, was opened in 1998 after nearly twenty years of work.

 

The Tarot Garden was AMAZING!  Truly gorgeous!  A bit more macabre than Parc Güell, but equally colorful and frivolous!  I don’t know all the figures in a tarot deck, some of these are rather ominous (such as the multi-headed beast, which may be a hydra?).  Over all, though, it was incredible. 

 

For readers who want a description of working on the garden, it begins at the website under “Chronology,” at the 1979-1980 dot, if you want all the details. (I did – I’ve worked in enough mosaic that I could guess how these sculptures were made, but I like to be certain.)  Website (in English): https://ilgiardinodeitarocchi.it/en/

 

The short summary: the land was cleared.  Each building or sculpture had a foundation laid.  Then the shape of the structure was created using iron bars (armature), which was then covered in cement.  Wire nets were wrapped over that.  Tiles were created at the studio for each structure, and cemented in place.  Grout between the tiles was the last step, and voila, we have a garden.

 

One of the things that struck me was the multitude of female forms, all looking like fertility goddesses.  Beyond voluptuous, with heavy breasts (often spouting fountains!), and wide child-bearing hips.  I couldn’t decide if the fertility goddess motif reflected Niki’s years as a model, likely eating to retain a slim figure, or if this was her rejection of stereotypical female roles and her symbolization of women as strong powerful figures, the Mother Earth and Earth Mother concept.  Maybe a combination of both.  But either way, the women were decidedly powerful as well as lushly Junoesque.

 

Every surface was covered in mosaic – embossed tiles, marbled tiles, hand-painted tiles.  From the fountain entrance to the female knight on a horse to the happy dragon to individual pillars at Niki’s former residence, everything was mosaic!  Ah yes, I was in absolute mosaic heaven!

 

We wandered around, in and out of structures, just marvelling at the beauty or strangeness of it all, depending on your perception.  For example, Niki’s house – the exterior was beautiful, with different sections tiled in solid colors separated by bands of hand-painted tiles.  One band of small tiles depicted that fertility goddess known as the Venus of Willendorf, one of the first known small sculptures of a fertility figure. 

 

But the interior of the house, all curving and undulating surfaces, was tiled in broken mirror.  Few windows, open doorways, electric lights, and yes, harsh and stark glass.  It was intense and somewhat disturbing, and decidedly strange.  We all agreed it was not somewhere any of us could live!  Definitely not cozy nor homey in any way, and rather cold, even in the warm Italian weather.  (Apparently Niki only lived there a short time.) 

 

All of those feelings maybe have been because the mirrored interior was such a stark contrast to the colorful and happier exteriors, I don’t know.  But no one seemed to feel happy or comfortable inside that house.

 

I loved the pillars, each with a different motif.  Some were covered with glass tiles, others with round balls of clay, each in a different color.  The whole place was an exuberant explosion of texture and color and shape!

 

Of course, I managed to get a bit lost trying to leave, and kept hitting dead ends.  I think I did see all of the garden that way, however, so I really didn’t care.  And I wasn’t the last person back to the bus, so it all worked.

 

I had never heard of the Tarot Garden, and am so glad we went here!  Absolutely worth another visit, and probably more time than the hour or so we had here.  It really is unique!!!

 

TONS of photos, but I will try to keep it manageable.