The mis-named ‘Chinese Garden’ in Ninfa

Nowadays when someone talks about ‘Ninfa’, it refers to an area of English landscape garden in the province of Latina, about 50 km southeast to Rome. ‘Ninfa’ could be dated back to the Roman era, because of the historical remains of a temple dedicated to Nymph. The German historian Ferdinand Gre- gorovius called it ‘the small Pompei of the Middle Age’. From the 1920s, its owner, the family of Caetani, converted the ruins of the medieval city, which had been deserted since the 17th century, to an area of English landscape garden, that we call today ‘the garden of Ninfa’. The title, the Mis-named ‘Chinese Garden’ in Ninfa, could be understood from different levels: literally, there is indeed a small area whose name is ‘Sorgente dei bambù’, the spring of bamboo, some of the visitors would like to call it ‘the Chinese garden’, where the gardeners cultivated bamboos and managed small ponds with a spring, and also built some stone constructions; on the other hand, if we re-examine the whole landscape structure of Ninfa, as a romantic English landscape garden, we can see some kind of the oriental influence on the European garden culture, or we should say, a misunderstanding of Chinese gardens. The ‘misunderstanding’ reflected fantastically in the gardens of Ninfa, when the Caetani constructed the garden of Ninfa upon the real ruins of the medieval city, which gives today’s visitors an extraordinary experience in the picturesque garden.