Not many people realise that in the 19th century, Tivoli had a visitor attraction that surpassed Hadrian’s Villa and Villa d’Este. But when artists, poets and writers of the Romantic era visited the town during the Grand Tour, the first place they wanted to see was another garden – a garden carved out of a chasm that ran down the side of the Great Cascade of the Aniene river.

The Villa Gregoriana was created by Pope Gregory XVI in 1832 as a public park and had all the requisites of the ideal Romantic environment. It was a wilderness garden, plunging steeply down into a ravine, filled with secret grottoes, old Roman ruins, thick Mediterranean vegetation, pools and frothing cataracts, dominated by the sound of the crashing waters of the 120m-high waterfall.