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If you were an enormously wealthy Roman Senator, the chances are excellent that your garden would look very much like the outer Peristyle–the outer garden–of the Getty Villa gardens.
It is a classic Roman garden: enclosed by walls, a few palms and shrubs growing in neat patterns, artworks placed along the walkways, and a long, shallow reflecting pool at its center. There is no lawn and few flowering plants. The colonnade along all four sides offers shelter from hot Mediterranean–or in this case, California–sunlight. The interior walls of the colonnade around the garden are painted with murals.
Sculptures such as this “Bust of a Man”, right, are part of Getty’s collection sited along the pool. The man depicted is Scipio Africanus, a famous Roman general.
Seen from the pool and garden, the Getty Villa Museum is a re-creation of a Roman villa, the Villa dei Papiri, which was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
Gardens surround the Villa
In those times it would have been a grand country home with many rooms surrounding a central courtyard. The garden, called a Peristyle, would have been in front of the villa. When John Paul Getty had the Villa and its gardens built, his goal was to have a place to house his extraordinary art collection.
Another smaller peristyle garden is within the center of the Getty Villa Museum. Like the main garden, it has sculpture lining a shallow pool.
All the ground floor rooms in the villa can be entered directly from this Inner Peristyle.
Yet another garden, still smaller, is off one side of the Getty Villa Museum. It is walled, but has no shady colonnade and the pool is for lilies and other water-loving plants. The fountain against the wall is covered with tiny mosaic tiles.
On the west side of the Getty Villa is a large kitchen garden. There you will find date palms, fig trees, grapes, lavender, and other edible herbs and plants that would have grown in a Roman Senator’s country garden. The produce from this garden would have been used to feed family and household members during the Roman era.
John Paul Getty never saw the finished villa. He passed away in England before it was entirely complete. Today, it is home to his antiquities collection, and the other artworks he owned can be found at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
To preview other Public Gardens in the West, go here
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