Italy's Garden of Monsters

"Why did a Renaissance duke fill his wooded park with gargantuan stone sculptures?

An enormous bug-eyed dragon fends off an attack by a pair of lions. The toothy maw of a killer whale erupts from the earth across the way from an immense lumbering tortoise that carries a female figure, perhaps the goddess Fame, on its back. A huge siren with two tails sits opposite an equally large winged harpy with a serpent’s tail and a lion’s claws. These fantastical sculptures are among dozens of such creations lining the paths that wind through a forested ravine below Bomarzo, a medieval town in the Lazio region of Italy."

https://archaeology.org/issues/july-august-2025/features/italys-garden-of-monsters/