I spent this past October on a writing residency in Toffia. Toward the end of my stay, I visited one of Italy’s oldest and most enigmatic sculpture gardens: Sacro Bosco (Sacred Wood), colloquially known as the Parco dei Mostri (Park of Monsters). Located near the hillside town of Bomarzo, about sixty miles north of Rome, Sacro Bosco is a wild garden of seven acres punctuated by dozens of bizarre, larger-than-life sculptures. 

The garden was commissioned in the sixteenth century by Pier Francesco Orsini, a nobleman, military commander, and patron of the arts. His family was one of the most powerful in Italy since the year 1000, giving the church multiple Cardinals and Popes. In the second half of his life, Orsini commissioned the acclaimed architect Pirro Ligorio to design a winding garden that did away with the pristine symmetry and order of typical Italian Renaissance gardens. To decorate the grounds, he had the artist Simone Moschino carve Mannerist sculptures out of the site’s volcanic rock. As visitors wander through Sacro Bosco, they stumble upon a giant turtle, a Pegasus fountain, a leaning house, a dragon, a mermaid, a war elephant, and many more figures. 

In true Mannerist style, the creatures are exaggerated and distorted, inflecting the garden with a sense of wonder. This era’s fascination with the strange and the fantastical emerged from the rediscovery of Nero’s buried palace in Rome, the Domus Aurea. The frescoes found there blended animals, plants, and human forms in whimsical combinations, a style later called “grotesque,” from the Italian grottesco, meaning “of a grotto,” in reference to the underground chambers in which they were discovered. These motifs captivated Renaissance artists as a playful counterpoint to their ideals of beauty and harmony. By embracing this chaos, Sacro Bosco became a prime example of the newfound artistic freedom—an art form that valorized the sublime and the absurd.

One of the garden’s most striking sculptures depicts two colossal figures locked in combat. One giant overpowers the other, grasping his opponent’s legs as though ready to tear him in half. Both figures’ faces are twisted in expressions of rage or agony. Scholars have suggested various interpretations of this sculpture: it could represent the mythological battle between Hercules and Cacus, or a depiction of the rape of an Amazon, with the lower figure long misidentified as a man due to the absence of breasts. 

The garden’s origins are equally mysterious. We don’t know why Orsini commissioned it, and scholars point to contradictory theories of personal tragedy, grandeur, or eccentricity. We do know that after his death, his children seemed simply unable to pay for the upkeep of the grounds, and the garden disappeared into history. It was rediscovered and popularized in the twentieth century, with Salvador Dalí shooting a short film there and later drawing inspiration from its monsters for his 1946 painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Around the same time, the garden drew the attention of influential figures such as the Italian critic Mario Praz and the French poet Jean Cocteau, who celebrated its surrealism in their writing.

Walking through Sacro Bosco, not unlike reading a fairy tale, is about surrendering to its dissonance and contradictions. Moschino’s stone creatures are moss-covered and weatherworn. I felt like I had stepped into one of Studio Ghibli’s animated films—as though these were the same stone guardians Sen’s family discovers at the beginning of Spirited Away. The grounds are littered with cryptic inscriptions, and I found myself drawn to two in particular. The first was carved into the mouth of a giant ogre whose gaping stone maw seemed ready to swallow visitors whole: “Ogni Pensiero Vola” (“All Reason Departs”). The second was located near the entrance: “Tu ch’entri qua con mente parte a parte et dimmi poi se tante meraviglie sien fatte per inganno o pur per arte” (“You who enter here put your mind to it part by part and tell me whether so many marvels were made by deception or by art”). These lines taught me how to approach my walk through Orsini’s grounds: with the understanding that the garden is not a place meant to be decoded.