Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001, it represents a masterpiece of the Italian garden with an impressive concentration of fountains, nymphaeums, caves, water features and hydraulic music.
Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, after the disappointments due to the lack of papal election, revived the splendor of the courts of Ferrara, Rome and Fointanebleau here and revived the magnificence of Villa Adriana.
Governor of Tivoli since 1550, he immediately toyed with the idea of creating a garden on the slope of the joyful valley, but only after 1560 the architectural and iconological program of the Villa was clarified, conceived by the painter-archaeologist-architect Pirro Ligorio and built by the architect of court Alberto Galvani. The palace was decorated by the protagonists of late Roman Mannerism.
The Villa was almost completed when Ippolito d’Este died in 1572. Further interventions in the seventeenth century followed a period of decline, until Cardinal Gustav Adolf von Hohenlohe revived its splendor by also hosting the musician Ferenc Liszt (1811-1886). Acquired by the Italian state, between the 1920s and 1930s the Villa was restored and opened to the public.