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Honey, Can You Buy Me a Villa?

By Tineke Ziemer

September 14^th, 2014

After spending a lovely Saturday at Villa d’Este in Tivoli… I’ve decided that I just can’t possibly live without a villa of my own! I informed my husband of this shortly thereafter. He laughed. It wasn’t very nice.

But it can’t be just ANY villa. It most certainly needs to have old weathered statues and vines growing up the stone walls, and fountains… there must be fountains, lots and lots of them! Oh, and ponds! With fish of every shape and size, surrounded by short stone walls, wide enough to lay on in the sunshine. I request mosaic paths through the garden, lined with huge pots of flowers and green plants, and little gates and doorways that lead to mysterious looking corridors. It wouldn’t be a villa without extravagant terraces overlooking Roman hillsides and vineyards below. And it must, absolutely must, have a spiral staircase!

Does such a villa actually exist outside of my wanton dreams? Indeed it does! Though what I’ve just described is precisely the Villa D’Este and as much as I could beg my husband, I don’t think we can afford to buy a kabillion dollar historic site. Plus, the tourists would get quite tiresome after awhile. How could I soak my feet peacefully in the Fontana di Nettuno with all of that endless clicking of cameras?!? I tried it yesterday while I was there. I closed my eyes, put my feet in the icy water and pictured myself spending endless afternoons under the great Italian sky. The vision was so real, so vivid, that I could feel the sunshine on the back of my neck, hear the breeze whispering through the trees, taste the sweetness of the grapes being brought to me on platters, hear the adoring sounds of my guests as they stood beneath the fountain, all exclaiming how beautiful my villa was. Except my grapes were coming from a plastic baggy I’d packed that morning and my ‘guests’ were annoyed that I was soaking my feet in the way of their fountain photos.

Perhaps the most enchanting part of this trip has been the ability to step into another world and lose myself there. Whether back in time to ancient Roman adventures or forward in time to a leisurely life spent under the Italian sun…this is an incredible place to unleash the imagination. For a storyteller, it’s rich with fanciful muses and inspirations, filled with mystery and longings of the heart. I am enamoured.

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Believe it or not, the fountain pictured below is NOT the largest of them all, but the time of day prevented me from getting a good shot of the biggest one. Villa D’Este has hundreds of fountains, in all shapes and sizes. Amazingly, it redirects a river into hundreds of tiny streams and feeds all of the fountains with gravity, before connecting back into one river again at the bottom. Brilliant! And it has pretty stunning views of Rome as well!