The Sacro Bosco (sacred wood) at Bomarzo is the most extraordinary and endlessly fascinating of Renaissance estates. The creation of Pierfrancesco Orsini, known as Vicino (1523–1585), a cultured and erudite noble condottiere, it was begun about 1552 and continued sporadically through his life. Much was done in the few years after 1560, when his beloved wife, Giulia Farnese, died, including construction of the tempietto dedicated to her.Throughout the bosco are inscriptions, several alluding to Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. In letters, Vicino always used the terms bosco or boschetto (little wood) and the moniker Sacro Bosco, which derives from Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia, appears in one of the inscriptions. The sculptures, a number carved from the volcanic outcroppings, include fantastic animals, colossal figures, mythological characters, grotesque heads, pseudo-Etruscan tombs, and fake ruins. While some of the garden elements belong to a familiar type, as do the themes of art and nature, love and death, and playful references to the passage of time, their particular manifestations here are unique. Uniqueness was precisely the aim: the inscriptions invite astonishment at the marvels, which compete with the seven wonders of the ancient world. Rediscovered in an abandoned state in the 1940s, the Sacro Bosco has inspired a novel, an opera, Surrealist paintings, Niki de Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden, and numerous popular and scholarly books and essays with a wide variety of interpretations. The garden has been rehabilitated and opened to the public, becoming an off-the-beaten-track tourist attraction, re-imagined as a Park of Monsters and a proto-theme park.This substantial volume began with a conference held at the Palazzo Orsini at Bomarzo in September 2007 and features twenty-three short essays addressed to an audience already familiar with the Sacro Bosco. Those interested in pursuing further the compelling questions of attribution, chronology, character of Orsini, iconography, context of the bosco, state of preservation, and later influence will find a variety of provocative texts that will set them pondering the plan and photographs, as well as the letters, documents, and transcribed inscriptions in the appendix.Any understanding of the Sacro Bosco must begin with the patron. Alexander Kohler's essay on Orsini's military career between 1545 and 1557, in the middle of which he began the boschetto, places the garden in a wider European, political, and religious context, but also within a culture of nobles and divided loyalties. Enzo Bentivoglio quotes liberally from the seventy-five letters that Orsini wrote to the French noble Giovanni Drouet in Rome over the course of a decade, 1573–83. These irreverent, ironic, and personal communications reveal an intimate friendship, with exchanges about the frustrations and delights of children, the pleasures of