Off to Europe : In Italy, Gardens That Have Kept Their Character for 400 Years : The Renaissance lives on in outdoor settings of stone, trees and water.

The Renaissance gave European art a new perspective, restored classicism to architecture and brought gardens out of the medieval cloisters and into the country.

From the mid-16th to the early 17th Century, Italian nobles, church dignitaries, and the merely wealthy took to the hills and plains around cities, eager to breathe clean air, contemplate gorgeous vistas, and bring order to the “chaos” of nature.

Unlike the English garden designers of the 18th Century, who created whole lakes and hills and forests where there were none, the Renaissance Italians adapted their designs to the contours of the land--hills, usually--and the climate--dry, often. Flowers, so beloved of modern tourists and gardeners, played a small role; one reason these gardens remain beautiful after 450 years is that they depend on stone, trees, shrubs and water for their structure and character. So beware: A profusion of pansies in an otherwise green Italian garden is a sure sign that the place has been “updated.” Sneer at this.

The Renaissance started in Florence, and so did my husband, Ed, and I, launching our garden tour last September at the Pitti Palace, which is the entrance to Florence’s only public park, the Boboli. Designed in 1549 by architect Il Tribolo, the park was originally the private garden of a nobleman--Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo de Medici the Great.

The day was hot and dry, and the climb was decidedly uphill, stretching from the Pitti’s back doors up to the dizzying summit, with a first stop at the horseshoe-shaped amphitheater. The park was almost deserted; a few tourists rested in the amphitheater seats, on the shady side, staring back at the palace or at the large bathtub-shaped fountain in the arena.

We walked up the left side, where the paths are shaded by tall, rangy trees and unclipped hedges that needed a good watering and pruning. When we reached a plateau, like a stair landing, we walked out to the middle of the garden, from which we could look down on the amphitheater, the Pitti, and Florence beyond. Not a skyscraper in sight. Cosimo might have admired the same rooftops.

The statue of a goddess, “Abundance,” looms at the top of the hill. Behind her is a wall, and behind that, somebody’s house. We walked back down the opposite side, stopping at the kaffeehaus for some lukewarm soda and another fabulous view of Florence rooftops. It wasn’t until we looked through guidebooks back at the Palace that we discovered we had missed a good third of the garden (there is only one map, a large one at the entrance; we had neglected to memorize it). Back up we labored. But the wall was still behind Abundance. Walls on either side. We wandered desultorily back and forth, looking for the magic path. I finally asked some workmen, with much pantomiming and broken Italian, and they pointed us downhill , to a nicely hidden path leading south into cool, overgrown holly mazes. These flanked a descending allee of cypresses punctuated with classical statues. Dozens more statues lurked along the outer paths, those of working-class peasants and artisans. At the bottom of the hill, a tiny lake was topped with its own tiny island, a fountain, potted citrus and more statues.

This part of the Boboli terminates at the Porta Romana, or Roman Gate. It was closed, but to its right, around some shrubbery and statuary, was another gate, open and unattended. I like to think this is where the Florentines enter without paying. It is where we exited without another climb.

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The next day, we drove back roads southeast from Florence to the mesa-top city of Orvieto and the following morning took more twisty back roads to Bomarzo, a tiny dot on the map. A cart lurched along the road in front of us, so picturesque we almost missed the turnoff for the park called Sacro Bosco, or Sacred Wood--especially because the sign called it Parco de Mostrei, Monster Park. The monster moniker may be a limp attempt to stir up family interest in a bizarre, definitely adult garden.

The garden was commissioned by Prince Vicino Orsini in 1552 and designed by Pirro Ligorio, who was one of dozens of architects who labored on St. Peter’s basilica in Rome. But while the bones and stone of Sacro Bosco remain intact, Ligorio’s plantings have disappeared.

The garden is far from any villa, but people do not visit Sacro Bosco for fancy buildings or the spindly trees; they come for the gigantic, disturbing stone figures-- statues is too mild a word for these creatures. Orsini was a military man, but well read, and many pieces are engraved with Latin phrases. As with most Renaissance gardens, the statues evoke or personify classical mythology.

Through the gateway arch, down wood steps to the right, visitors are confronted with a giant, possibly Hercules, dismembering an upside-down enemy, perhaps a man raping a woman. The path then leads past a huge tortoise, Pegasus in a fountain, a decaying amphitheater with nymph statuary, and a two-story structure that leans crazily against the hillside. Glimpsed from this first, lower, path are huge stone characters above: a dragon, an elephant maiming a Roman soldier, a gigantic mouth with a table inside, a woman who seems struggling to rise up out of the earth, fish-tailed women, the three-headed dog Cerberus; at closer range, they are remarkably preserved, perhaps because they lay hidden, covered with weeds and vines, for almost a century before being rediscovered in 1949.

Some guidebooks hint that there were rumors about Orsini, that he was mad, a murderer, incestuous. Such gossip seems contradicted by the temple he built to his wife at the top of the hill, a sort of spiritual reward after the journey through hell.

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The perfect Renaissance garden, the small jewel in the flashy crown, is just 10 miles southwest of Bomarzo, in the small town of Bagnaia near Viterbo.

Although its garden was begun in 1566 for Cardinal Gambara, the third in a succession of four cardinals responsible for the villa and its garden, it is named for the Lante family, which owned the property for 300 years, until World War II. The garden’s design is attributed to master architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, usually called simply Vignola, who also designed the gardens at Villa Caprarola. Lante is considered his masterpiece, one of the finest gardens in Italy.

The gates open onto Villa Lante’s garden from the side, next to one of the small twin villas. On the left is a fountain on a tiny island in a rectangular pool, with four little bridges leading to the island. Surrounding the pool are paths bordered and mazed with low hedges. Ropes across the walks discourage closer inspection. We ascended the hill that rises between the villas, through shadow and sunlight, following the garden’s water to its source. The first fountain above the still pool is an impressive array of large figures, waterfalls and waterspouts. Above that, a small flat lawn is bisected by a stone table, which is itself bisected by a thin channel of water. How the water actually gets up onto the tabletop is not apparent. Water moves around the base of the table, too, which may have been slightly uncomfortable for Renaissance picnickers who didn’t want to get their feet wet. Above the “dining room,” a fountain is fed by a spectacular water chain, shaped like interconnected crab legs, a splashing, gurgling rush of little whitecaps that flows from a still higher fountain.

The water enters the garden at the top, in a grotto dripping with ferns and moss, a hint of the wilderness just beyond the walls. From the topmost fountain, one can see the distant hills--but not the level below. Each “room” or level is separate, but joined to the whole by the plane trees, holly and water. All this has been achieved on a comparatively small piece of land.

Books tell us there were once many stone seats at Lante, where visitors could linger, but these have been removed. This is unfortunate, because of all the gardens we visited, this is the one that invited a longer, closer acquaintance. This is the one I wanted to own .

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It was a pleasant back-roads drive southeast from Bagnaia to Tivoli, a hill town about 20 miles east of Rome, where popes, cardinals and bishops repaired in the summer to avoid the searing Roman heat. From the 1550s to the 1620s, the cardinals of the d’Este family relaxed at the spectacular Villa d’Este, today probably the most famous villa and garden in Italy, judging from the quantity of buses disgorging tourists.

Unlike Lante, d’Este’s villa is open to tourists, room after room with no furniture, no artifacts, just ceiling frescoes and nifty floor tiles. We couldn’t see much of the garden from the windows--tall trees now obscure the fountains. The three fish ponds were empty, ready for heavy-equipment dredging. (In Italy, it seems everything of interest is always under renovation, in whole or in part.) We left the villa through a gift shop, trotted down impressive stone stairs and finally were in the garden.

We wandered to the right, heading toward the sound of rushing water--the Ovato fountain, a beautiful egg-shaped cascade. Farther down are the water organ, which once moaned and groaned when water coursed through its pipes; the owl fountain (originally rigged with little mechanical birds that were frightened away by a big mechanical owl) and about a dozen smaller fountains. The amazing 100 fountains line a walkway--thin streams spewing from the mouths of creatures, all different, based on characters from Ovid’s “Metamorphosis.”

Thanks to designer Pirro Ligorio (a busy man) and hydraulic engineer Orazio Olivieri, water from the Anio river was pumped uphill to d’Este’s fountains, and the sound of water is everywhere: cascades, waterfalls, jets, trickles, sprays, geysers, water in channels and ponds, pouring down stairs, dripping in grottoes, burbling in rills, arching in drinking fountains.

Four hundred years ago, we would have been drenched. Vincenzo Vincenzi, the fountain maker responsible for much of the waterworks at Villa d’Este, was fond of giochi d’acqua, or water jokes. One of his more memorable gimmicks directed water up from the ground under women’s skirts--a startling cold shower. The cardinal then in residence considered this rude, so Vincenzi made the water jokes more polite, spraying guests in the face and back.

Villa d’Este, for all its glorious Renaissance water system, has not aged well. The few statues that remain (most have been removed to Roman museums for preservation) have lost noses and other parts to erosion, decay and relentless moisture. A miniature stone city, said to be a replica of Rome, has virtually disappeared. Perhaps because of all this--but probably just to observe the afternoon siesta--the water is turned off from 1 to 2 p.m. every day. That’s no joke.