A descending series of pillars, each topped by an empty urn, makes a stone banister up the edge of the steps. It's always described as a table; but in fact, when you look along it, you see that the top is laid not flat but in a smooth, gentle convex curve: very beautiful, but expensive on plates.Behind the massive, benign figures of the sea-gods, stairs lead up either side to meet on the next level. This makes a serene link between the grotesque masks at either end, which spew water into a shallow, narrow moat around the base of the table. The concentric semi-circles of stone, lined with miniature jets, were scarcely dribbling.

A broom handle thrust into a pipe between one level of the fountain and the next suggested that somebody, somewhere, might be doing something about the problem. But not today.An immense stone table lies between the Fountain of the Lights and the Fountain of the River Gods, with a deep water-filled channel about a foot wide carved down its centre. The rose garden on the left-hand side was also out of bounds. So were the loggias of the muses.Up, up was the only option, especially as the Fountain of the Lights at this level had evidently jammed. He was still hovering, perhaps to see whether I was going to jump the barricades that shut off the grottoes to Neptune and Venus. (I think they were muskets - it was difficult to tell at the distance I had been put by the ticket collector.)"Up, up" was the unmistakable message from the ticket collector's arm. Not a drop came from the boatmen who once blew jets from their stone muskets.

The whole sequence tells the story of man's journey from the wilderness (the grotto) to the state of high civilisation that married nature and art in the intricacies of the final parterre.Having marked me down as a trouble-maker, the ticket man shooed me up the stairs at a brisk trot which meant that it was only at the Fountain of the Lights, on the next terrace, that I could turn again to look at the bottom parterre.The initial view from Gambara's entrance gate had shown that it was thick with weeds That didn't matter. But there were puzzling ragged holes in the middle of the big clipped squares of yew that punctuated the 12 box- edged beds.Mark Laird's fine book The Formal Garden solved that problem. Every photograph of that famous parterre shows big terracotta pots containing orange trees filling these holes and flanking the steps between the terraces. But there was not a single pot in the entire garden.And the fountain was not playing. Now that all the flowers Gambara planted in the parterre have gone, along with the fruit trees that once surrounded it, you need moving water to bring life to the severe, static layout. But the water surrounding the stone boats was as still as glass.

Since the garden was almost empty, I tried hopping over the rope to get to the fountain, but a roar and a great deal of body language from the ticket collector put paid to this little bid for freedom The parterre was off the menu. As it turned out, so was much else.The garden climbs the hill by way of a series of dramatic set-pieces: the Fountain of the Lights; the Water Table; the Fountain of the River Gods; the Water Chain; the Fountain of the Dolphins; and, finally, the Grotto. Visitors were brought in through another entrance on the right, past the fountain of Pegasus shown in an early 17th-century plan of the garden. The Lex Hortorum (law of the garden) of the period guaranteed access for all - free.This same side entrance, still in use today, brings you out on a broadwalk between the great parterre at the end of the garden, on the left, and a bank, sternly bisected by box hedges, that rises between the two square villas that make a matched pair either side of the central vista.The big parterre on the left, with its dramatic centrepiece of fountain and stone boats, was roped off when I visited. This is the end of the long, dramatic vista that stretches up and back over fountains and pools, terraces and stairways to the grotto at the far end of the garden, where the water that provides the central backbone of the design starts its long journey.This is the entrance that Cardinal Gambara, who began constructing the garden in 1568, would have used. In no other country does it seem to matter less that you cannot speak the language. Here, body language says as much as words. From the square, the narrow Via Giambologna leads directly to the gate that was designed as the main entrance to the garden.