A theater of symbols in Valva’s Villa d’Ayala

The seventeen hectares of Villa d’Ayala in Valva, in the province of Salerno, are home to one of Italy’s most beautiful gardens, dating back in the 18th century. Maples, chestnut trees, holm oaks, flowers, statues and fountains surround a magnificent castle with a beautiful “vegetable amphitheater”:

“The unsettling 19th-century semicircle,” Vincenzo Cazzato writes, “is both a ‘living theater’ and a ‘theater of death’, formed by concentric steps with low box tree espaliers, where dozens of busts representing heroes and heroines are placed.”

“The semicircle is meant to be a theater of the Virtues and Honor of the Valva family (‘valva’ […] also means seashell, and in this case we have one made of greenery).”

“Conceptually, this theater is linked to those designed by William Kent for the Chiswick Gardens and to Stowe’s ‘Temple of British Wonhies’ and its parodies (such as Samuel Cheamey’s design), as well as to the examples in Villa Brenzone over Lake Garda, by Wörlitz.”

“The amphitheater in Valva also echoes Dante’s Celestial Jerusalem, shaped like an amphitheater and a candid rose, connected to the symbolic shape of the ‘Mystical Heaven on Earth’ in the Holy Staircase fresco by Giovanni Guerra (1589); like Eden and the Celestial Jerusalem, it is made up of a series of concentric circles of ‘human’ trees and symbolic animals (apostles, patriarchs, prophets, virgins) around the tree of the Cross” (translated from “El lenguaje oculto del jardín” Editorial Complutense, Madrid 1996).

Now let’s move from symbols to images, and on to reality.

©www.invalva.it, ©Vito Galgano, ©Gelsi Di Masi, ©Maria Cristina Napolitano, ©Sele D’Oro