On Walls and Gates

Last year, while I was living in Rome for a month and a half, I rented a lovely, quirky apartment on the Via del Mascherone.  It had been built into the side of a church, wedged between the nave and transept; the entire apartment was only about ten feet wide - including the rotting wooden staircase, which snaked up three stories from an ersatz kitchen, past a mouldering bathroom, to a narrow bedroom; and down which I spent the entire month and a half accidentally dropping everything I owned.  Each morning, I woke up to a find that a light layer of dust (but Roman dust! no doubt tracked from Gaul on Caesar’s soles!) had settled on my sheets in the night.  Even so, excepting the view from my landlord’s apartment, my bedroom had one of the best views in all of Rome: from my window, I looked out upon the garden of the Palazzo Farnese, and, beyond it, to the arch built by Michelangelo - which, intended to connect to an unbuilt bridge across the Tevere, instead curves gracefully over the Via Giulia and simply halts.  At dusk, the garden was alive with swarms of those small, green parrots which first had charmed me in the pine forest grid of the Villa Doria Pamphili.

Every evening, a nicely dressed group of men and women would stroll across the bridge, apparently from Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte, along the northern wall, and into the Palazzo Farnese (now home to the French embassy).  My early fantasy that this procession involved an evening aperitivo (to which I might be invited) was dashed by my landland’s son, who guessed that they were probably members of the Confraternità or the French diplomatic delegation. 

But to return to the Palazzo Farnese: the garden is surrounded by a tall brick wall, perhaps twenty feet high, wonderfully overgrown with vines and imbued with a sense of history that is hard to replicate.  And it is irresistible to tourists and their cameras, due to the large metal gate that opens onto the Via Giulia.  The gate does not welcome you, nor does it bristle with sharp points and stakes (as do some medieval and Renaissance doors in the city).  It is simply aloof: it doesn’t hide the garden completely, but neither does the garden lay open before you.  It shows you just enough to let you dream of walking amid the cypress and magnolia and enormous pots of orange trees in the garden beyond.

As with the Palazzo Farnese, the best walls reveal and conceal.  In the case of city gardens, yes, gates are necessary points of access, but they also provide protection, a sense of secrecy and of mystery, a focal point within and without. Charleston is a city full of gates, seducing the visitor with glimpses of gardens which you can see only from certain angles or at a discrete distance.  (The gate is not a bad symbol for the city of Charleston, which, it has always seemed to me, presents to its visitors an illusory openness, even as it keeps those awful Yankees at polite arm’s length.)  You catch a glimpse of box parterre and ivy-covered wall, hear the splash of water, but remain, in the end, on the other side of an iron fence. 

Even when the view is itself extraordinary, it can be made into an experience to anticipate, having been framed by the opening in a wall.  This gate is in the Giardino degli Aranci, a park on the Aventino, in Rome (and one which I should love, but which somehow leaves me cold).  What lies beyond this wall, down the snaking cobblestone path and across the hills, is Rome.  It would be Rome, gate or no.  And yet, having been thus framed, how much more enticing does a walk down the path beyond it seem?

Then there are those gardens, as at Hollister House, in Connecticut, that use walls, shorn from hedges or built by brick, to separate the landscape into garden "rooms."  Even as these walls provide a sense of protection for the viewer and the plants in each room, just as important to the overall design is the way in which the walls hide or reveal the garden and landscape beyond.  The garden is arranged mostly along a series of formal axes, alternately drawing your eye out to vistas beyond or punctuating the view with a determined endpoint.  Each passageway through a wall into another room is carefully thought-out moment of transition.  

I think that the passageway, gated or not, is the most seductive part of a garden.  The best passages are never mere design flourishes.  They orient the eye, they say: Look forward, look here, look through the walls and past the gates for what’s to come.

Villa Gamberaia, Settignano, Italy