Rome’s Beautiful Parks: Villa Pamphili

Rome’s Beautiful Parks: Villa Pamphili

One of the many great aspects of Rome are its parks, the city is full of green places where you can go to relax and temporarily forget the hustle and bustle of the city and of course paint.

The largest park in Rome is Villa Pamphili and it happens to be just around the corner from my studio.

I paint here often and enjoy hunting new locations, there are always new places to discover here and when I found this place I knew I had to paint it.

On the Path to Villa Pamphili
Oil on Linen Panel
9 x 12″
$600 Available

Purchase Information

One of the reasons that Rome is full of public parks is because the noble families who owned these private parks and villas gave them up after WWII, turning them over to the Italian state who made them open to the public. The actual villa in this park remains private and is occasionally used by Italy’s President, but mostly it remains silent and uninhabited.

This lends to the somewhat abandoned and silent feeling of this park, especially around the villa. It is a world of ghosts and makes me try and imagine times past when families and friends strolled through this park or men went to hunt, but mostly the grounds remained quiet with the sound of the breeze blowing through the trees.

Today this particular park is loved by mountain bikers and exercise freaks for the sheer amount of space available where you go along shaded paths, an aqueduct, into pine forests and across open fields.

The question that I ask myself more and more while going out to paint is how to represent a place? Often I am tempted to paint “details” or small moments such as a fountain or a corner. But in order to capture a place a wider view is necessary sometimes and this is one of those views.

What I love about this path is how it is surrounded in deep shadows of the trees and opening up to a shiny bright white, brighter than the sky and almost hurting your eyes to look at it. The villa is just behind the hill and so we can’t fully see it, but the path leads us on in our curiosity.