Palazzo Farnese (left) overlooking the village of Caprola (right)

…is the most idyllic and purely conceived of hilltop Lazian towns which we have made a Sunday pilgrimage to, around Monti Cimini and dominated by the great pentagonal Renaissance genius of Villa Farnese (where upon entry into its hollow cylindrical central courtyard we were drawn by sounds of  Mozart into the first great painted room of many where a chamber ensemble was playing, and later into room after chamber after room after anti-chamber of intimate though grand purely geometric rooms – paul tested out the cubic room with rhythmic sounds brought back to our ears with shocking delayed effect – each painted entirely in awesome golden, azure and green scenes of people and animals, paganism and Catholicism, power and domination, myth and allegory, and a drop-dead map room that would made you feel really in charge of things, and finally out to the formal gardens fed by the quintessential grotto of my dreams cooling us with simulated rain on a warm afternoon – all which making us ask ourselves what happened to people with lots and lots of money at least knowing what to do with it? thinking about the future? building for the ages? giving us something we can at least enjoy today, hundreds of years later? what about Berlusconi pleasure palaces? will we ever visit those in 500 years?) at the head of the one main road, making no mistake of who was in charge, leading to it’s pair of symmetrical curving ramps – today delightfully framing the local Boy Scout Troops temporary camping quarters of a tent hoisted up surprisingly high on timbers, where just inside I discover a vast vaulted subterranean hall where the former Caprarola Boy Scouts of previous generations are watching vintage footage of themselves Boy Scouting in town decades ago.