Villa Torlonia
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The Villa Torlonia is the name applied to several country retreats of the Torlonia princely family in the cities of Rome and Frascati, Lazio, Italy.
[edit] Villa in Frascati
The land the villa in Frascati was built on belonged to the Abbey of Grottaferrata, which donated it in 1563 to Annibal Caro, who commissioned a small villa where he spent the last years of his life, translating the Aeneid. (In 1896, Prince Leopoldo Torlonia placed a memorial stone to remember this event.)
In 1571 Beatrice Cenci bought the villa, which passed in 1596 to Cardinal Tolomeo Galli, Secretary of State under pope Gregory XIII. who commissioned the first enlargement.
In 1607 Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Paul V's nephew, took possession of the Villa; he enlarged and embellished it. The waterworks used to feed the fountains of the Villa and the spectacular Theatre of the Waters with a water flight of steps, date to seventeenth century (designs and directed by Girolamo Fontana, Carlo Maderno and Flaminio Ponzo) and completed with a large frontal with niches and fountains. Other 17th and 18th century owners were the Cardinal Ludovisi, the Colonna family, the Conti family, and the Sforza Cesarini family.
In the 19th century, the villa was acquired by Prince Torlonia whose name it commemorates. During the Napoleonic Age, the Torlonias profited by the Holy See's troubles and amassed a fortune by speculative transactions. Besides, they acquired titles and redeemed their plebeian extraction.
The villa's grand Baroque terraced gardens and fountains provided subjects for watercolors by the American painter John Singer Sargent and more others painters.
The old Villa was almost completely destroyed on September 8, 1943, when Frascati was bombed. During that period it housed the court martial and SS detachment. After that numerous partisans from the Alban Hills (Castelli Romani) area were transferred here and killed.
In 1954, the Duke Andrea Torlonia made an exchange of real property with the mayor Micara of Frascati between the "Gardens" of villa Torlonia and the "Quadrato estate": now the gardens are a public park.
[edit] Villa in Rome
The Villa Torlonia in Rome was begun for the banker Giovanni Torlonia by the neo-Classic architect Giuseppe Valadier in 1806 and finished for his son Alessandro. After a period of disuse this was the state residence of Mussolini in the 1920s. He paid an annual rent of one lira. Mussolini and Prince Torlonia constructed a bomb shelter in the 3rd and 4th century Jewish catacombs that lie beneath the villa's famous landscaped park.
The Villa houses part of the Torlonia collection of neo-Classic sculpture. In the park is a kiosk in the Moorish Revival taste, one of thirteen garden pavilions representing exotic parts of the world. Villa Torlonia, the most famous 'English' landscape garden in Italy, became a part of the public park system of Rome in 1978. The Villa was abandoned and allowed to decay in the decades following the war, but has recently been restored and opened to the public.
