The park of the Villa Chigi was an ideal place for Calame to teach this new practice. Owned by the Chigi, a rich Sienese banking family, the park and villa was much admired. Ludwig Richter (1803-1884) describes it in his memoirs: ‘The owner left this piece of marvellous nature totally untouched and without any culture. The large groups of towering trees, oak and pine, crowned the steep hills and served as wonderful studies for the painter! The pathways covered in undergrowth as high as a tall man and impassable … rotten trees, having fallen, were left untouched, decaying in this wilderness; creeper plants were rampant and plentiful, growing up dying tree trunks; in short it seemed like someone’s magic and enchanted wonderland, which even the liveliest fantasy could not have painted better.’

Goethe also mentions the park in his Italian Journey (Velletri, 22 February 1787). Indeed the rocky staircase and towering entrance gate that Calame chose for this sketch may well have been the same view that Goethe once stood before and described as ‘unutterably beautiful.’ The picturesque qualities of this site ensured its popularity among many of Calame’s contemporary painters; the same view was painted by Ernst Fries in 1826, August Lucas in 1831, and Johann Wilhelm Schirmer in 1840 (fig. 1).