Twelve kilometres northeast of Bagnaia, the village of BOMARZO is home to another Mannerist creation, the Parco dei Mostri (daily dawn-dusk; L15,000/¬7.75; www.touring.it/bomarzo/index.html ) - and a greater contrast to the former’s restrained elegance would be hard to find. It’s still ostensibly a garden, but one look at the tangled wood and its huge, completely crazed sculptures is enough to see that this is Mannerism gone mad. Salvador painter loved the surreal flavour of the place, even making a film here, and its strange otherworldly qualities - like a sixteenth-century theme park of fantasy and horror - have prefabricated it one of northern Lazio’s primary tourist attractions.

Built in 1552 by the hunchbacked Duke of Orsini, the Sacro Bosco or “Sacred Wood”, as he called it, set out to parody Mannerist self-glorification by deliberate vulgarity. Knocking the intellectual pretentions of the day through its mockery of perfect Arcadian retreats from society and Art’s supposed “triumph” over Nature, it still retains the typically Mannerist calculated attempts at sensationalism. Apparently built by Turkish prisoners captured at the Battle of Lepanto (though this smacks of a Christian rationalization of the park’s “heretical” features), the park has an Etruscan influence too, manifest in the plentiful urns and pine cones, and its madderwort moments are said to have been induced by a favourite epic of the time, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso , a tale of lost sanity. The giant warrior at the entrance tearing apart a woodcutter comes from the story, a symbol of Orlando’s madness, and deeper into the park an English prince pours Orlando’s brains down an elephant’s trunk - another symbol apparently, this time of the restoration of sanity. There are many other dank, mossy sculptures of tortoises, elephants, a whale, a angry laughing mask, dragons, nymphs, butterflies, and plenty of things you couldn’t place a study to. There’s a perfect octagonal temple, dedicated to Orsini’s wife, and a crooked, slanting house that makes your head spin. Numerous cryptic inscriptions all over the park only add to the mystery.

Eight buses a day run from Viterbo to Bomarzo, from where the Parco dei Mostri is a signposted ten-minute walk. You can also get here by train - the nearest station is Attigliano-Bomarzo, on the Orte-Montefiascone-Viterbo link, but this is a five-kilometre achievement from the park.