The ground floor, Museums of Villa Torlonia

Villa Torlonia, the most recent of the villas belonging to Rome’s nobility, still retains a particular fascination due to the originality of its English-style garden (one of the few examples in the city), and to the unexpectedly large number of buildings and garden furniture in the grounds.

Atrium
Valadier’s original simple facade was added to with a majestic pronaos, porticoed on the ground floor, open in a loggia on the first floor, and crowned by a triangular pediment.

The lower section of the forepart has a base made of smooth ashlars that imitate travertine, and forms a covered atrium that allowed carriages to pass through.

Today it is home to the bookshop.

Entrance
An oval-shaped room , lined by 12 white marble columns, leads into the palace.

The vault has a structured stucco partition in which the coats of arms of the Torlonia family are represented, flanked by allegorical figures of Fame. The walls are lined with a splendid “marmoridea” that imitates “fior di pesco” marble.

The white Carrara marble floors and bardiglio marble have an elaborate partition that matches the design of the ceiling compartments.

First Vestibule
On the left of the entrance there is a simple room lined with “marble” in imitation of “coral breccia” , with coffered ceilings decorated entirely with splendid, partially gilded stuccoes of putti, volutes and rosettes.

The room contains several sculptures from the Torlonia Collection that fortunately have remained in the Villa.

Bath
Continuing on the left, you come to the Bath, clearly inspired by Renaissance “stoves” in its physical arrangement and in the decorations designed by Giovan Battista Caretti: grotesques on a red ground separated by panels containing scenes from mythological stories with erotic or aquatic themes, which were executed by the painter Pietro Paoletti from Belluno.

These are Leda and the Swan, the Abduction of Europa, Pan and Syrinx, the Birth of Venus, Diana and Callistus, Hylas abducted by the nymphs, and other stories.

Unusually, the scenes are painted in oils on masonry with the exception, on the far wall, of a half-fresco of Raphael’s Galatea, also painted by Paoletti.

Library
On the same side, the next room is the Library. This only conserves the ceiling decorations with a panel painted by Pietro Paoletti of Dante led into Limbo by Virgil to meet the great poets of antiquity.

The “Berceau” Room
The “Berceau” Room takes its name from the decorative motif on the vault that simulates a pergola.

At the centre there used to be a panel, painted by Domenico Del Frate, of putti fluttering around the Torlonia coat of arms. The walls were once decorated with views by Giovan Battista Caretti, but they have all been lost.

The three stucco reliefs by Antonio Canova (originally there were ten) were inserted in the walls of the Salle à manger in the Palace of Villa Torlonia.

They were still in place in 1829 when the Villa was inherited from Giovanni by Alessandro Torlonia, but were lost during the redecoration of the room and its transformation into a “Ballroom”. This took place during the renovation of the building by Giovan Battista Caretti, works that began in 1832.

Fortunately, three of the ten reliefs were found in 1997 in the rooms under the Theatre. They have been identified as copies (with some variations) of the series known through other examples that are today in the Museo Correr in Venice and the collections of the insurance company Assicurazioni Generali.

The reliefs are of Socrates drinking hemlock (from Plato’s Phaedo), the Death of Priam (from Virgil’s Aeneid) and the Dance of the Phaeacians (from Homer’s Odyssey).

Portico
The portico links the two wings of the Palace and dates from the first design by Giuseppe Valadier. It is lined by Tuscan columns made of travertine and is closed off by wide glass doors.

The two rooms on either side of the Portico have no decoration and are used now as the Sale Video and Documentazione.

The Psyche Room
Opposite the “Berceau” Room is the Psyche Room, named for the paintings in the vault by Pietro Paoletti that tell the Story of Psyche .

The cycle was inspired by the frescoes in the Farnesina painted by Raphael, as is often the case in the houses of the nobility.

The scenes depicted are: Eros crowning Psyche , Psyche and Zeus , Psyche before Venus , Psyche and Eros sleeping , Eros and Zeus , and, in the center of the vault, Mercury presenting Psyche to Zeus .

The Italian Artists and Poets Room
The Italian Artists and Poets Room is named after the 32 portraits painted by Pietro Paoletti within a Gothic-style painted architectural structure that was once enhanced with views and colored window glass.

The portraits are painted in standard generic Neo-Renaissance style . In the company of such famous figures as Dante , Petrarch , Leonardo and Michelangelo is the portrait of Carlo Torlonia , who was added in place of Giorgio Vasari.

Second Vestibule
The room next to the entrance is symmetrical to the one on the left side and very similar in appearance: it is lined with stucco marble in imitation of ancient yellow marble and has a coffered ceiling decorated with stucco rosettes and acanthus leaves.

Ballroom
The central feature of the Casino is the Ballroom, which is a full two storeys high. Caretti maintained the architectural structure he inherited from Valadier but added two structures for musicians at the sides and lined every part of the room with paintings, stuccoes, marbles and gilding.

The vault is decorated with stories of Eros, frescoed by Domenico Toietti and Leonardo Massabò, and the lunettes contain the Flight of the twelve hours, the Flight of the Three Graces (both by Massabò) and Parnassus by Francesco Coghetti.

The two orchestra structures stand on superb grooved columns made of Carrara marble, decorated with ornate capitals and architraves adorned with white stucco and gilt cupids by Pietro Galli. The walls are lined with stucco imitating ancient yellow marble.

The floor used to have a large polychrome copy of the Palestrina mosaic, but this was removed in 1888 and taken to Palazzo Torlonia in Piazza Scossacavalli, and is today replaced by a polychrome marble floor.

Staircase
The piano nobile is reached up an ingenious staircase , created by Carinetti in a small space, with marble steps and finely worked bronze balustrade by Filippo Ghirlanda .

Casino Nobile or Palace
In 1796 Giovanni Torlonia purchased the Vigna Colonna, situated on the Via Nomentana, and commissioned Giuseppe Valadier to render the buildings and park more imposing.

Between 1802 and 1806 Valadier worked on the rebuilding and enlargement of the Casino Nobile, incorporating the old structure and adding to it with foreparts, porticoes and spacious terraces.

The core of Valadier’s version of the palace was the Salle à manger (Dining room), which is today known as the Ballroom. Illuminated by a single large semicircular window, the light was reflected by the mirrors that lined the other walls, artificially increasing the sources of light and creating the illusion of a large space.

The salon was decorated with elegant stucco hangings, paintings by Domenico Del Frate, and ten plaster low reliefs by Antonio Canova (some of which are today displayed in the “Bercerau” Room).

After Giovanni’s death, in 1832 his son Alessandro commissioned the painter and architect Giovan Battista Caretti to add further to the majesty and magnificence of the palace, and to decorate it with works by various talented artists and craftsmen.

To make the Palace more visible to those arriving from outside the city, the original simple facade designed and built by Valadier, which faced onto Via Nomentana, was given a grandiose pronaos. This, in turn, was endowed with a monumental loggia closed by a triangular pediment that enclosed a terracotta high relief of Bacchus returning triumphant from the Indies on a chariot drawn by tigers by Rinaldo Rinaldi.

The two small porticoed wings designed by Valadier were replaced by two porticoes with Doric columns that encircled the east and west sides of the Palace, forming semicircular projections at the four corners.

The severe and imposing monumental aspect of the building was acceded to by a wide steps leading up the Capitoline (Cordonata) that was at one time lined with colossal ancient statues.

But Caretti’s most extensive renovation was to the internal decorations which, more than the architecture, gave a completely new definition to the spatiality of the rooms.

The ground floor and piano nobile were used for official purposes, and their rooms were decorated throughout in varying styles and motifs that were perfectly in keeping with the referential taste that characterised the villa as a whole.

The service rooms and lodgings for the servants occupied the second floor and basement, and from the latter an underground gallery (still existing) led to the Casino dei Principi.

The basement also provided access to two bunkers built by Mussolini – one as a bomb shelter and the other as a gas shelter (temporarily closed to the public) and to an underground room discovered during recent restoration work.

This was built by Giovan Battista Caretti to resemble an Etruscan Tomb in both its construction and decorations, which were clearly inspired by the images found on Etruscan-Corinthian earthenware.

Museums of Villa Torlonia
The two Museums of Villa Torlonia are the Casino Nobile and the Casina delle civette and are part of the Museum System in the Municipality of Rome.

The Casino Nobile owes its appearance to the intervention, around 1802, by Giuseppe Valadier , followed, between 1835-40, by that of Giovan Battista Caretti who added the majestic pronaos of the facade.

Many painters worked on its decoration, such as Podesti and Coghetti , as well as sculptors and plasterers from the Thorvaldsen and Canova school.

Since opening to the public in 1997 as a museum space, the original Casina collection has been enriched with stained glass by the same authors and with drawings, sketches and preparatory cartoons.