Italy’s Garden of  Monsters

Features July/August 2025

Why did a Renaissance duke fill his wooded park with gargantuan stone sculptures?
Courtesy Cosimo Monteleone, Rachele Bernardello, and Paolo Borin
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A sculpture known as the Hell Mouth is one of several dozen fantastical creations dating to the sixteenth century that line the paths of a park called the Sacro Bosco, or Sacred Wood, near the central Italian town of Bomarzo. The Hell Mouth was designed to serve as an alfresco dining room, with its tongue forming the table.

An enormous bug-eyed dragon fends off an attack by a pair of lions. The toothy maw of a killer whale erupts from the earth across the way from an immense lumbering tortois

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