Monsters Inc

When it comes to wacky gardens they don't come any stranger than the epic Park of Monsters in Bomarzo, Italy. I've only ever seen it in pictures, but that hasn't stopped me understanding what a weird and wonderful place it is.

Jessie Sheeler has been there many times in person, the first while "just tootling around Italy in a little car". "We went to the Villa Lante," she explains, in a soft Scottish burr, "and in the back of the guidebook, there was this wee paragraph about this other garden nearby, and they just made it sound like nothing else. So off we went."

Seeing Bomarzo had a huge impact on Sheeler. "I was absolutely staggered, and I thought to myself, I'd love to understand this." The garden is a forest of monstrous sculptures, dating back to the Renaissance, and Sheeler's new book, The Garden at Bomarzo: a Renaissance Riddle (Frances Lincoln, [pound]25) is an enjoyable attempt to make sense of the deeply symbolic scheme, all devised by the garden's first owner Vicino Orsini, in the 1500s.

"I grew to like Orsini as a person," says Sheeler. "He was so frank, so ordinary, and yet obviously as utterly bewitched by the life of the intellect as he was by the life of the body." Sheeler tries very hard to make us all fall in love with the Lord of Bomarzo, who was a soldier, courtier and lover in the best Renaissance mould. She found Orsini's correspondence scattered around various Italian archives, and quotes liberally from his letters to bring him and his love affairs vividly to life.

Orsini's character stamps its charm everywhere you look: a gaping mouth of hell asks you to "Abandon all thought, ye who enter here". But as art historian Robert Hughes recounts in the Italian section of his autobiography, Things I Didn't Know, visitors will find that inside the infernal jaws there's a nice picnic table. Elsewhere there is a huge tortoise carrying the figure of fame, and an elephant that once had real ivory tusks. All the figures are covered in gorgeous thick green moss, as if the garden had been newly uncovered.

In fact Bomarzo did go through a period of neglect, its fortunes reviving in the 1940s with Surrealist interest from Salvador Dali. Today, it seems to be nicely incorporated into the local Italian Saturday afternoon, with its own football pitches and a place to have a barbecue. Not very National Trust, I suggest. "No," smiles Sheeler, who clearly likes it that way, "but there is a man you see lurking behind trees making sure you don't do anything naughty."

Sheeler's interest in Bomarzo has come after a life which seems to have been specially designed to lead towards writing on the subject. While still at university reading classics, she started the Wild Hawthorn poetry press with Ian Hamilton Finlay. Their books are now collectors' items, as you can see from the gallery website at www.inglebygallery.com.

After an arty start, Sheeler ended up in the real world: for many years she was head of classics at Bedales school. She can see symbolism everywhere: when talking about her own garden, which edges the Solway Firth, she describes a cormorant trying to gobble up a two-foot eel as a "dreadful prehistoric struggle".

This background made her the perfect person to write the authoritative volume on Ian Hamilton Finlay's Scottish art garden, Little Sparta (which is also available from Frances Lincoln). In fact, since her friend's death, she has been the custodian of his landscape. Ian Hamilton Finlay's gardens are full of classical allusion, wit and symbolism, and they often contain the same kind of mystifying beautiful slogans carved into stone as are found at Bomarzo.

To read Sheeler writing about Bomarzo is a delight. Was she tempted to try to make her own garden in a similar mould? "Oh no," she laughs, though she admits she aims to try some of the things that she loved at Little Sparta. And when you are next in Rome, think about a trip to the Park of Monsters. Just don't forget to take a football and a barbecue. nVisit www.parcodeimostri.com

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