Vizcaya's Grotto Rooms Are the Weird Part

Everyone sees the Renaissance tapestries and the formal gardens and the stone barge. Vizcaya Museum and Gardens at 3251 South Miami Avenue delivers Gilded Age excess — seventy rooms, ten acres of terraced gardens, James Deering's Italian palazzo on Biscayne Bay. The main house is magnificent and exhausting in equal measure.

The basement is where it gets interesting. Rooms Deering used as swimming pool, boat storage, and entertainment — walls decorated with shells, coral, and coquina rock in grotesque patterns. Faces, animals, abstract forms, by craftsmen given the instruction "make it strange" who took it seriously. The grotto room with dripping stalactites and shell-encrusted arches feels like the inside of a sea creature's imagination.

The gardens: bougainvillea in magenta wherever it gets the slightest encouragement. The stone barge offshore like a hallucination. Stand on the east terrace at end of afternoon when the bay light goes gold. Open Wednesday through Monday. Go for the grotto. Stay for the garden. The dream has been dreaming here over a century.