Villa Lante was built at the foot of the Cimini Mountains, above the small town of Bagnaia. The villa is located in the middle of a big park with fountains and century-old trees covering about 20 hectares of land. In the 13th century, Bagnaia became the summer residence of bishops and cardinals and, from that time on, churchmen and high prelates often came to this little town to relax and take some rest. In the late 16th century, Cardinal Francesco De Gambara decided to create a wonderful villa with garden and fountains in a big holm hoak wood near Bagnaia. About 50 years earlier another cardinal, Raffaele Riario, had already transformed the wood into a hunting preserve. The famous architect Jacopo Barozzi probably designed Villa Lante and Tommaso Ghinucci, a clever hydraulic engineer who also worked at Tivoli, built its hydraulic system. When Cardinal De Gambara died, the Villa was handed down to Cardinal Peretti Montalto, who owned it for more than thirty years. The complex is named after the Lante Della Rovere family, who held the villa from the mid-seventeenth century until the 1930’s.