How to visit the underworld for a small admission fee and still get back for dinner.
This place should be on your bucket-list: a visit to the Parco dei mostri, the monster park, in the town of Bomarzo, where you can get a glimpse of the afterlife.
The underworld seems to be trending right now. There is the mythological saga produced by Netflix, Kaos, starring Jeff Goldblum as the modern day version of the god Zeus. Basically an Orpheus update, Kaos feels like a camp family drama with plenty of cringy characters, seedy locations and over the top mansions. The familiar cast of misfit deities do their best to keep the human population in check while maintaining their hedonistic lifestyles. The gods’ lives are eternal but not without risk, while the humans follow their mortal destinies until they are sent into the afterlife.
A British production, most of the scenes were filmed on location either in Italy or in Spain. Zeus’ Olympian palace is stitched together with pieces of the Reggia di Caserta and the Villa d’Este in Tivoli. “Krete” is made up of a couple different locations including Andalusia for the scenes in Plaza de Espaňa in Seville, and Valencia with depictions of the San Miguel de los Reyes Monastery. A couple times Rome’s San Lorenzo neighborhood creeps into view as well. Some of the best scenes, however, are the Felliniesque visions of Hades and the underworld, shot entirely in black and white. An ocean-liner is seen ferrying countless sullen passengers across the river Styx for processing in “Asphodel,” where they are met by legions of inhuman bureaucrats.
Kaos is a visual and mythological masterpiece, but another take on what it might be like to jump into the underworld is presented by the fantastical American director Tim Burton. His latest film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, led by a brilliant cast including Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega and Willem Dafoe, is his entertainingly crafted vision of what the supernatural world must be like if it were to be set in a haunted medieval subterranean basement. Burton channels the 1960 Italian cult film “La Maschera del Demonio,” directed by Mario Bava, known to English speaking audiences as “Black Sunday,” to mine this heavy gothic comic-horror genre to the fullest. Instead of boats crossing the River Styx, the unfortunate dead are shuttled on to the “Soul Train” —a subway train riffing the groundbreaking 1970s Black TV dance show of the same name.
This latest Beetlejuice doesn’t have many live locations that stand out, besides the small-town of East Corinth, Vermont, but Burton makes up for it with his incredible stage sets, costumes, and handmade puppets. Once off the Soul Train, passengers are led into a cramped and very claustrophobic waiting room, where they are pretty much left to rot while in line to get their papers from bored office clerks. Here in Burton’s afterworld, the landscapes are bleakly 50s post-office style combined with lots of basements and subbasements, staircases, crypts and cobwebs.
Both films are wonderfully rendered fantasies, and both deal heavily in the themes of mortality, immortality, and life after death. And both offer a plenitude of human-like and beast-like characters that transition unrestrained from one world to the other. Yet neither, evidently, gives us a chance to physically experience what it would be like to be there and to be able to take a safe look around.
A couple weeks ago while up in the country an hour north of Rome, I made a special visit to Bomarzo, the Parco dei Mostri (Park of the Monsters), or Sacro Bosco (Sacred Woods), where you can tour one of the most fanciful 16th century parks found anywhere in Italy. These mannerist gardens were conceived by Pier Francesco Orsini the Roman nobleman who lived in the hill-town of Bomarzo and who spent the last 40 years of his life there until his death in 1585. Orsini commissioned the architect Pirro Ligorio to create the park’s wild stone creatures and otherworldly inhabitants. Dedicated to Orsini’s wife Giulia Farnese, the park is filled with pagan monsters and mythical figures, out of scale animals, a theater stage, an off kilter tower, a miniature temple, and a giant head of an ogre. These are laid out along a meandering path inside a large wooded forest, with flowing streams and open fields.
Crossing the parking area, I purchased my ticket from inside the reconverted stables, and then stepped outside and walked to the arched entrance. On my way I spotted a novel child’s play-set with built-in slides fastened to plastic replicas of the giant ogre and a tilting tower, a kids’ sized preview of what was to be found inside the garden.
This was a sign, I thought. I would climb into the plastic Ogre’s mouth, go down the metal slide, back up into the plastic tilting tower and do it over again, thus breaking my spell with reality. That might have been wishful thinking, but actually, once I wandered through the arched entry gate, I did become transformed. It could be I previously watched the short Salvador Dalí film on YouTube capturing him inside the park in 1948, Nel mondo del surreale: Dalì nel “giardino dei mostri.”
The Parco dei Mostri in Bomarzo had been in a state of abandon for several hundred years, and was revived by its new owners well after the Second World War. The park grew in popularity as more and more visitors were drawn to its surreal landscapes. It could have been Salvador Dalí himself who was behind this phenomenon, he did have the knack for drawing lots of attention, and with hindsight he does come off as one of the earliest cultural influencers. In the short clip Dalí made with the Italian public television channel the artist is seen prancing around the monster sculptures and the strange architectural monuments in unrestrained delight.
I might be wrong to think that Orsini created this Monster Park to bring back his wife Giulia Farnese from the deceased, in much the same way Orpheus attempted to bring back Eurydice. Yet there are many apparent symbolic connections to the afterlife in this sacred landscape. The word Ogre derives from the Etruscan Orcus, a reference to their god of the underworld, in line with the Greek god Hades or the Roman god Pluto. The giant ogre’s wide open mouth and the cavernous interior replete with table and benches, besides being an excellent echo chamber, is also very much a space of mystical transition and spiritual encounter.
Much like Salvador Dalì, Michelangelo Antonioni was also attracted to Bomarzo. The great Italian director filmed a documentary in 1950 about Orsini’s Vignola designed castle in the town, as well as the Bosco Sacro just below, capturing in the process the park’s surprising state of abandon. Artists and architects have continued to flock here, like Niki de Saint Phalle, Vittorio Gregotti, Tomaso Buzzi, Paolo Portoghese, Daniel Spoerri, and many more. I would love to get hold of the park’s guest register and make a select list with all of their names.
The giant ogre’s head, meanwhile, continues to haunt us. In the 1974 sci-fi film Zardoz, directed by John Boorman and starring Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling, the huge flying head dispatches lethal arms to a population of near savages, while serving to protect a privileged community of immortals. Boorman wrote Zardoz out of frustration after failing to make a film from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where, by the way, there are plenty of ogres.
Ogres and nature, I am reminded: the Bosco Sacro, the sacred woods where the monster park is located, dates back to Etruscan times. As it was back then, mythical monsters had also the role of defending nature, and this is one of the grander themes that I have been exploring over the last couple years while living here in Italy. There will be more on this soon—stay tuned!