Benvenuto – Welcome to Bomarzo! I am Ignazio, your host for the week ahead. While you must be hungry, and ready to explore the ancient palazzo that will be your home, I know that what you really want to see is the garden. For it is the garden that everyone really wants to see. I see you have brought the great Salvador Dalí with you! It makes sense that he has come, for this place is as surreal as his painted fever dreams. Come, let us walk, and I will tell you the story of Italy’s famous garden of monsters. The Sacro Bosco, or the Sacred Wood, is a Mannerist garden that defies the conventions of its age, where the surreal and the mystical collide. It is here, in this labyrinth of stone and shadows, that I fulfill my purpose to you as both guardian and guide, for this is no ordinary place—it is a realm where the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead blur. Pier Francesco Orsini, born in 1523, and known to most as Vicino, thought he was the one who had the idea for the garden. But what few understand…