Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, who twice missed the papacy, consoled himself from 1560 with this hillside villa and a garden that turned Tivoli's river water into theatre. Pirro Ligorio designed it as a sequence of terraces: the long Avenue of the Hundred Fountains, the Oval Fountain, the Rometta with its miniature Rome, and the Organ Fountain, which plays by water pressure alone, as it did for sixteenth-century guests.
There are fifty-one fountains and nymphaeums, hundreds of jets and cascades, and no pumps: everything flows by gravity. Inside, the villa's rooms are frescoed with mythology and Este history. UNESCO inscribed it in 2001, and the garden shaped European garden design for two centuries.
