An idyllic garden of Italian Renaissance

BAGNAIA, Italy — I know how to get to paradise in this life.

It lies atop a hill about 60 miles north of Rome, where a gentleman-cardinal built a garden in the 16th century. His architects created it from water and stone, green leaves and vine. But the result is more than the sum of its parts. Villa Lante embodies the humanist ideals of the Italian Renaissance.

Soon after I moved to Rome last spring, I began seeking out area gardens.

I took a Vatican Gardens tour to see the pope's beautiful backyard, and I saw the ingenious fountains at the Villa d'Este, about 20 miles east of Rome. I found secret havens in the city — the rose garden on the Aventine Hill, for one — and tagged along with a group of architecture students from Yale University to visit Villa Madama, in the hills northwest of the city.

When summer's heat settled in, I fled the city almost every weekend, navigating a rental car to the Grande Raccordo Annulare, the ring road that encircles Rome. From there it was easy to find cool, green, consummately beautiful pieces of paradise.

In 1578, Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Gambara was suffering an attack of gout when Pope Gregory XIII arrived at the Villa Lante. When the pope saw Gambara's exquisite and obviously costly estate above the hamlet of Bagnaia, he canceled the cardinal's allowance.

It couldn't have been a good day for Gambara.

When I visited Villa Lante, I was blessed in every way. On the drive from Rome, I followed the path of the Tiber River, lined by fields of golden, just-reaped summer hay.

Villa Lante is comparatively demure, intent on perfection, not astonishment — without the distraction of flowers — and unchangingly green through the seasons.

When I passed through the gate, I caught a strong whiff of freshly clipped boxwood from the parterres around the Fountain of the Moors on the lower level, the interlocking hedges shaped in spirals, squares and circles with little lemon trees peeking out.

Then I turned around and saw the chain of fountains that decorates the hill. Drawn from springs in the nearby San Valentino hills, the watercourse emerges from the highest grotto, known as the Fountain of the Flood, then vanishes and reappears in pools and channels that flow between the two palazetti, or "little palaces."

There's the Fountain of the Dolphins, richly emblazoned with the Gambara crayfish crest; the scalloping Chain Fountain, as ramblingly beautiful as any mountain stream; the long Cardinal's Table, with troughs of running water that served as finger bowls for Gambara's dinner guests; and the classic Renaissance garden on the lowest terrace.

I read in Helena Attlee's "Italian Gardens" that, from top to bottom, Villa Lante tells the story of human evolution, beginning with the rustic Eden created by God at the Fountain of the Flood and climaxing in the perfect geometry of the lower parterres.

To understand the garden's symbolism isn't to take any less sensual delight in it. I couldn't keep from dipping my toes in the cold, flowing water of the Chain Fountain. I ran my palms across the moss that clothes Villa Lante's stone nymphs and goddesses. I sat at the Cardinal's Table, half waiting for Gambara's liveried servants to serve lunch.