The grotto at Villa di Papa Giulio, Rome, by an unnamed photographer for Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904).
Featured on PDR in the essay Petrified Waters: The Artificial Grottoes of the Renaissance and Beyond
Idling alongside the waters of artificial grottoes, visitors found themselves in lush, otherworldly settings, where art and nature, pleasure and peril, and humans and nymphs could, for a time, coexist. Laura Tradii spelunks through the handmade caves of the Italian Renaissance and their reception abroad, illuminating how these curious spaces transformed across the centuries.