As I stepped through the nearly 500-year-old stone archway, I was engulfed in silence. Stairs meandered into groves where trees filled with newly opened leaves spilled over onto the path, the branches blocking the view of the Lazio region’s shrub-peppered hills.

Nestled near the quiet Italian town of Bomarzo, about 92km north of Rome, the Sacro Bosco (Sacred Wood) was built in the 16th Century by Pier Francesco ‘Vicino’ Orsini, a great military leader and patron of the arts. But in designing the Sacro Bosco, he bucked the tradition of the Italian Renaissance garden.