Villa d'Este Tivoli

A Renaissance cardinal's hillside, an hour east of Rome. Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este gave the slope to water in 1550 and the engineers worked the rest of his life on the plumbing. Cento Fontane runs the length of one terrace, a hundred small mouths feeding one long pool. The organ fountain still plays a tune on the hour, on water pressure alone. The cascade was old when Liszt sat down at a piano here and wrote about it. Nothing in the garden uses a pump; the water arrives from the Aniene through a tunnel under the town and runs by gravity through every fountain on the slope.

Slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, in our family studio in Knoxville, Tennessee.