Below is a highly edited Wikipedia entry as background to this photo. There are somewhere around 500 fountains throughout the villa and two are shown here. A the top is The Fountain of the Organ (Fontana dell’Organo) that supplies water to The Fountain of Neptune (Fontana di Nettuno) located below. In front is the fish pond. This is a vertical panorama that I could not quite straighten out. Remarkably there are no other visitors visible to give a sense of scale. I am using one eye today as I had cataract surgery yesterday so I may have not noticed some of the defects. I did see a light rainbow in the lower left fountain and took the liberty of enhancing it.
The Villa d'Este is a 16th-century villa in Tivoli, near Rome, famous for its terraced hillside Italian Renaissance garden and especially for its profusion of fountains. It is now an Italian state museum. The Villa was commissioned by Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este (1509–1572), grandson of Pope Alexander VI through his mother Lucrezia Borgia. Thanks to his ecclesiastical and royal connections, he became one of the wealthiest cardinals of the time. He was five times a candidate for Pope, but was never selected. He had he position of Governor of Tivoli and with it came an official residence located in a former convent of the Benedictine order. The residence was not large enough for the enormous household of a Cardinal as prominent as d'Este, but it did have a spectacular view of the countryside below, including Hadrian's villa. and an abundant natural water supply for fountains and gardens. D'Este commissioned a new villa and garden which would exceed anything the Romans had built. He obtained an abundant supply of marble and statuary from the ruins of Hadrian's villa. Between 1563 and 1565, a huge amount of earth was excavated and used to construct new terraces; arcades, grottos, niches, and nymphaeums. The nearby river Aniene was diverted to furnish water for the complex system of pools, water jets, channels, fountains, cascades and water games. The Fountain of the Organ (‘’Fontana dell’Organo’’) is one of the most famous features of the garden; it was described and imitated throughout Europe. Work on the masonry structure began in 1566. One of the designers, Calude Venard, invented the ingenious mechanism of the water organ, which was installed in 1571. The fountain was the first of its kind, and astonished everyone who heard it. The clever mechanical design enabled the falling water to play musical notes and complete tunes. When Pope Gregory XIII visited the villa in 1572, accompanied by his court of cardinals and princes, he insisted on inspecting the interior of the fountain, to learn if someone wasn't concealed inside making the music. It now has 144 pipes, and is controlled by a cylinder, operated by the water, which can play four pieces of late Renaissance music for a total of four minutes. Directly below the Fountain of the Organ, and receiving the water from the upper fountain, is the Fountain of Neptune, a work created in the 20th century to replace a garden landmark which had deteriorated. The space was originally occupied by a rocky cascade, created in the 17th century by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. It was commissioned by Cardinal Rinado I d’Este as a background for the lateral axis of the garden, unfinished by Cardinal Ippolito. Bernini's plan called for a waterfall from the Fountain of the Organ which leaped over the grottoes of the Sibyls, then cascaded down a rocky slope to a lake decorated with reefs and statues. Unfortunately, the cascade was entirely neglected for two centuries, dry, crumbling and overgrown with vegetation. In the 1930s the architect Attilio Rossi created the present fountain, using what remained of Bernini's cascade. Tthe grotto contained a 16th-century torso of a statue of Neptune, which had originally been intended for an unfinished fountain of the seas.
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