FT Clive Cookson MAY 17, 2019
As they wander through the Villa Borghese gardens, visitors to Rome may be curious about Villa Albani Torlonia, a couple of hundred metres east of the city's landmark museum and gallery. They will not find much information in guidebooks, because the Albani villa and its gardens have never been open to the public. Yet art historians revere it as one of the richest and most interesting sites in the entire city. "Even people living in Rome generally have little idea that this marvel is hidden in the centre of the city," says Professor Salvatore Settis of the University of Pisa, doyen of Italian classical archaeology. "Yet it is Rome's only example of an 18th-century villa still in a more or less pristine state; it has one of the world's great collections of ancient sculpture — and it is important as the birthplace of neoclassical taste." Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692-1779), the most voracious collector of classical art in history, built the villa to display his third collection, having sold the first in 1728 to the Elector of Saxony in Dresden and the second to Pope Clement XII, who made it the basis of Rome's Capitoline Museums in 1738. The Albani family maintained the villa and contents until 1866, when they were bought by the Torlonia banking dynasty — financiers to the Vatican — who still own them today.
