TriadCity Message of the Day
2003-07-13

Il Parco dei Mostri, the Park of Monsters, is now open for exploration.

The Parco is a recreation of the Renaissance Villa Orsini a 16th Century art and nature garden on a hillside above Bomarzo, Italy. That the Prince Vicino Orsini was a tad eccentric will be apparent to explorers: the park is dotted with unusual sculptures, strange houses at tilting angles, paths which lead nowhere, flamingos and peacocks, figures of mythology, impractical sloped benches, and other surprising objects which may be allegorical, but which on first encounter seem baffling. The architect, Pirro Ligorio, crafted a dreamlike and sometimes disorienting environment which seems, come to think of it, not unlike that of a certain role-playing game we know and love.

The RL Parco languished in obscurity until re-discovered in the 1930s by the Spanish Surrealist painter Salvador Dali. Not surprisingly, Dali loved the statues, which he considered precursors to his own dream-inspired experiments. Today the villa and the Parco are owned by an enterprising art collector named Giovanni Bettini, who, with instincts that seem positively American, has turned it into the kind of roadside attraction familiar to anyone who's driven the backroads of Alabama.

What's all this have to do with TriadCity? And why's it in the "evil" part of town? We're not telling. :-)

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