Sleeping Beauty

A formerly abandoned estate in the Italian countryside undergoes an enchanting evolution

- Clare Foster

Deep in the Castelli Romani hills, 65 kilometres south of Rome, Torrecchia Vecchia is a place where nature and man have come together to make an extraordinary garden. Like the nearby Garden of Ninfa, it has been shaped around the ruins of a medieval village, giving it an air of romanticism and mystery only heightened by its magical setting in a landscape of untouched natural beauty.

Long abandoned, the 607-hectare estate, including a walled hilltop village and ruined castle, was bought unseen by the late Carlo Caracciolo, an Italian newspaper baron, in 1991, as a financial favour for a friend. He fully intended to sell it straight on, but when he and his wife Violante came to visit for the first time, they were immediately bowled over by its wild beauty.

Violante decided she would make a garden. Inspired by Ninfa, she wanted something soft and romantic, full of scented English roses that would clamber over the ruins. She asked Lauro Marchetti, Ninfa’s curator, to supervise the restoration of the ruins and, later, to begin designing a garden. It took 18 months to free the ruins from the tyranny of brambles and ivy, and slowly the garden began to be lifted from its centuries-long slumber. One of the first steps was to find water – crucial in this sun-parched landscape. Lauro and his team began to dig a borehole, eventually reaching a spring deep underground. This allowed the creation of a subterranean irrigation reservoir and a narrow stream that tumbles down the slope in a series of rocky cascades before reaching a pool at the bottom of the garden.