Ancient Rome in Los Angeles
By Batool Mahmood
Beautiful gardens convey a sense of time and place, evoking many different feelings as they work their magic upon us. Some may have the added dimension of transporting us to ancient times where the imagination is supported by archaeological finds and historical evidence so that the end result is as authentic a representation of what might have been as is possible.
The Roman gardens of antiquity recreated at the Getty Villa overlooking a bluff on the Pacific Coast Highway as it winds its way along the beautiful Los Angeles coastline, give us glimpses into an era long gone.
When I visited the place on a recent weekday morning it echoed with the chatter of schoolchildren out on a field trip, guides giving garden tours and visitors posing for pictures in the beautiful outdoor spaces. A short film running on loop gives a background on how the villa and gardens came to be a testament to the passion of an eccentric billionaire J. Paul Getty, who was an avid collector of artefacts from antiquity encompassing the Greek, Roman and Etruscan eras.
The Getty Villa is a recreation of an ancient Roman country house and its magnificent gardens.
But not content with just collecting these treasures, he decided to recreate an entire villa from Roman times, a befitting place to house the relics. The Getty Villa is based on a Roman country house in ancient Herculaneum — the Villa dei Papiri — as it must have looked in the first century AD. Buried as a result of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and with large parts of it still hidden under the lava, the architect borrowed inspiration from villas of that period that have been excavated in the towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae, to bring a period in history back to life showing us, in the process, how the gardens were integral to the villa and by extension to the life of the people who lived there.
The gardens were essentially outdoor rooms, to be used and enjoyed for both business and pleasure and there is a seamless flow between the interior and outdoors as we move through them. The intimate inner courtyard or peristyle, surrounded by its colonnade, is entered through the atrium or grand public room used for receiving visitors, with its ceiling open to the elements to collect rainwater in the pool below and channel it to underground cisterns where it would be stored for use in the house and gardens. The courtyard garden has an elongated pool with its fountains running through the center. Bordered by black marble statues in various poses, their outstretched arms and chiseled robes add a sense of drama to the scene. We can imagine the servants as they went about their work, moving under the colonnade with its soaring pillars, criss-crossing each other as they moved in and out of the surrounding rooms, past small tinkling fountains surrounded by topiary balls and parterres.
The courtyard garden has an elongated pool with its fountains running through the center. Bordered by black marble statues in various poses, their outstretched arms and chiseled robes add a sense of drama to the scene.
In contrast to all this activity, the secluded East Garden, connected to the courtyard through an opening, was a calming and peaceful place — a private and secluded area where women and children would relax listening to the soothing sound of water from the fountains under the shade of olive trees. A colorful mosaic fountain — a replica of an ancient one from a house in Pompeii — forms the centerpiece here, with turquoise, blue and yellow tiles pieced together to form a decorative visage, literally frozen in stone.
Retracing our steps into the courtyard and entering the dining room, adorned with delightful frescoes of animals and insects, the eye travels to the greenery beyond as the room flows seamlessly into the beautiful outer peristyle that beckons with its elongated pool and fountains and replicas of statues discovered at the Villa dei Papiri and placed in the same positions as the originals. It is another outdoor room, furnished with topiary and clipped hedges, with the surrounding, colonnaded walkway giving structure to the composition. It is a place to linger amongst magnificent specimens of pomegranate trees and the dusky pinks of oleander, as burning incense wafted through the air and the cares of the outside world seemed far away.
Moving on to a more practical garden ‘room’, one enters a herb garden that would have supplied the kitchen with culinary flavorings for delicacies such as roasting peacocks and flamingo tongues as well as providing herbs for medicinal purposes. This enclosed, rectangular garden is bordered by stands of olives, cypresses and date palms. The beds inside are neatly laid out, covered in the foliage of creeping thyme (thymus serpyllum) and sweet violet (viola adorata) and others with names such as Bears Breach (acanthus mollis) and Apothecary Rose (Rosa gallica). The garden’s bounty yields oil from the olive trees and the papyrus plants provide raw material for paper and give the Villa its name.
A visit to the Villa and its gardens is a journey back in time, to a place that comes alive with its meticulous attention to detail as it shows us the rhythms of daily life in Roman times, so many centuries ago. It is an educational experience and a repository for Getty’s acquisitions. But, equally important, it is a place of beauty and enjoyment.
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