Perhaps you are aware of Bomarzo, the Garden of Monsters, created in northern Italy by a 16th century nobleman and great patron of the arts, Pier Francesco Orsini. If not, please take a look on the web as there is ample information recounting the garden’s history, including many photos of the actual works of architecture and art. And, of course, as you can see, I have included pics of a number of the sculpted monsters.
One of the greatest admirers of Bomarzo was the Argentine author, Manuel Mujica Láinez (1910-1984) who was so taken by what he saw and read, he wrote this sumptuous 600-page novel. And readers of English are fortunate to have this work translated from the Spanish by none other than Gregory Rabassa.
Here is the garden’s creator and first-person narrator, Pier Francesco Orsini, on the coincidence of his being born at 2:00 in the morning on March 6, the same time and date (but slightly different year) as Michelangelo: "In truth, the stars that presided over our respective appearances on life's chessboard had arranged their players for quite different matches." For lovers of historical novels, particularly novels set in Renaissance Italy, many are the famous characters rubbing elbows with Pier Francesco, Benvenuto Cellini, to name just one.
To add a real zest to the storytelling, we discover on the first few pages that Pier Francesco is speaking of his life and beloved Bomarzo in a most unusual way. We read: "Our dwelling changed with the passage of time and lost all trace of grandeur, until its last anonymous remains disappeared in 1937 when Benito Mussolini ordered the opening of the Via della Conciliazione, which gave a clear view of Saint Peter's.”
Wow! Turns out, Pier’s horoscope foretold how he would live forever, which seems to be a true prediction since he is relaying his story as a four hundred and fifty-year-old 20th century man.
Herein lies the novel’s charm: we have the entire arc of an Italian Renaissance aristocrat’s retelling of his life in the 16th century among princes, barons, lords, ladies, cardinals and famous artists, architects and sculptors, but also a life filled with emotional and physical abuse, latent homosexuality, impotence and living as a deformed hunchback, conveyed with the intelligence of 20th century psychoanalysis. No wonder this one-of-a-kind novel was a best seller in Argentina at the time of publication.
And make no mistake, Manuel Mujica-Láinez’s novel is written in highly stylized baroque, as for example when Pier describes the forces protecting him in his boyhood, including his beloved grandmother, the one and only person who lavished affection on him and served as a shield against his sadistic father and the cruelty of his brothers:
“With her prideful insistence, which many readers will judge bold and demoralizing (primary school teachers particularly, if there are such among my readers), Diana Orsini furnished me with what nature had denied me: a security in myself, in my own strength, which, since it was lacking in me, I had to seek in other forces, real or fantastic, until I could afford myself a vigor and a faith that came, if not from me, from a mysterious cohort, as old as the history of my family, which gathered about my weak figure the breastplates of Constantius and Theodosius II, who had anointed us princes, along with the papal tiaras of Celestine III, Stephen III, and Paul I, the last two both saints, and Nicholas III, the one who dreamed of dividing Italy up among his Orsini nephews, and the mantles of the endless flow of queens from our house, queens of Poland, Naples, Humgary, Thessaly, Castile, and Empresses of the West, and swords brandished by the Orsini warriors who made Italy tremble with the brazen noise of their parades and skirmishes, tracing a wide, seven-colored freize which encircled my timidity and my exhaustion, a frieze in which there stood out above the crowns, scepters, croziers, flags, and the stiff-plumed helmets the swaying figures of the black bears as they rose up in their supreme and fearful majesty.”
In case you missed it, the above quote chock-full of references to all those princes and clergy, jewels and ornaments is contained in one sentence. I mention this so as to underscore the style of the writing from beginning to end: ornate bordering on rococo. Perhaps this is a prime reason Jorge Luis Borges, ordinarily no lover of novels, bestowed praise on the author for what he accomplished with Bomarzo.
This is a novel of surprises, thus I've gone easy on plot. As a nod to the arts, I will conclude with two quotes where Pier Francesco speaks of his garden on two separate occasions:
“My collections, my famous collections, have grown in a strange way. They were my faithful image, because they were absurd, intricate, and perhaps monstrous, also they were frivolous. Only a dilettante with strange tastes could have gathered them all together.”
“My life, my life transfigured into symbols, preserved for the centuries, eternal, imperishable . . . That was what I had to tell in Bomarzo . . . those woods would be the Sacred Wood of Bomarzo, the garden of symbols, of monsters. Every stone would have a symbol within it and all together, going up the slope where they had been strewn and settled by age-old cataclysms, they would be the immense and arcane monument of Pier Francesco Orsini. No one, no pontiff, no emperor would have a monument like that.”
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