The Casino dell'Aurora is the only portion spared from nineteenth-century demolition of the Villa Ludovisi (later Villa Boncompagni Ludovisi) in Rome. Originally the Casino, erected around 1570 and enlarged in the nineteenth century, was a three-story structure on a cruciform ground plan.

1. Casino Ludovisi Roma Orari Catania
2. Casino Ludovisi Roma Orari Lazio

1. Casino dell'Aurora di villa Ludovisi. 1596 - 1621 Cardinale Francesco Maria Bourbon del Monte Santa Maria Proprietario del Casino nella vigna, incarica il Caravaggio della decorazione ad affresco.
2. The Villa Ludovisi was a suburban villa in Rome, built in the 17th century on the area once occupied by the Gardens of Sallust (Horti Sallustiani) near the Porta Salaria. On an assemblage of vineyards purchased from Giovanni Antonio Orsini, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte and others, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi erected in the 1620s the main villa building to designs by Domenichino; it was.

The Villa Ludovisi was a suburban villa in Rome, built in the 17th century on the area once occupied by the Gardens of Sallust (Horti Sallustiani) near the Porta Salaria.^[1] On an assemblage of vineyards purchased from Giovanni Antonio Orsini, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte and others, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi erected in the 1620s the main villa building to designs by Domenichino; it was completed within thirty months, in part to house his collection of Roman antiquities,^[2] additions to which were unearthed during construction at the site, which had figured among the great patrician pleasure grounds of Roman times. Modern works, most famously Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Pluto and Persephone, were also represented. The engraving of the grounds by Giovanni Battista Falda (1683)^[3] shows a short access avenue from a tree-lined exedra in via di Porta Pinciana and cypress-lined avenues centered on each of the facades of the main villa, laid out through open fields, the main approaches to both the villa and the Casino dell'Aurora^[4] converging on gates in the Aurelian Walls, which formed the northern bounds of the park; symmetrical parterres of conventional form including bosquets peopled with statuary^[5] flanked the main avenue of the Casina, and there was an isolated sunken parterre, though these features were not integrated in a unified overall plan.^[6] The overgrown avenues contrasting with the dramatic Roman walls inspired Stendhal to declare in 1828 that the Villa Ludovisi's gardens were among the most beautiful in the world.^[7]

Casino Ludovisi Roma Orari Catania

Frescoes in the villa were carried out by Domenichino, Guercino, Giovambattista Viola, and others. A casina was added, largely to house the Cardinal's growing collection of Roman sculptures and inscriptions, which Alessandro Algardi treated to sometimes extensive restoration.

The villa passed to the ownership of the BoncompagniLudovisi family, which in 1872 rented it to King Victor Emmanuel II. The King used the villa as residence for his lover, Rosa Vercellana.^[8]

İn 1885, despite great protests among the intellectuals, its last owner, Don Rodolfo Boncompagni Ludovisi, the Prince of Piombino, faced serious financial troubles and decided to sell the property to the Società Generale Immobiliare. The Villa was divided into building lots.^[9] The sculptures^[10] were dispersed, and most of the buildings destroyed, the only one to remain being the Casino dell'Aurora.^[11]

The Via Veneto was driven through the former grounds, part of which are occupied by the American Embassy in Palazzo Margherita, and the Rione Ludovisi took shape, borrowing its district name from the cardinal and his villa.

• The gardens of the Villa and the Aurelian Walls in the early 1880s, in a painting of Ettore Roesler Franz

• The Villa gardens, by Luise Begas-Parmentier

• Fashionable Via Veneto was driven through the heart of Villa Ludovisi's park

Notes[edit]

1. ^A. Schiavo, Villa Ludovisi e Palazzo Margherita, Rome 1981; I. Belli Barsale, Ville di Roma, Milan 1970, vol. III.1; D.R. Coffin, Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome, Princeton 1991;
2. ^Inventories of Villa Ludovisi have been partly published: paintings inventory of 1623 (C.H. Wood, 'The Ludovisi Collection of Paintings in 1623' The Burlington Magazine, 1992) and of 1633 (K. Garas, 'The Ludovisi Collection of Pictures in 1633' The Burlington Magazine, pt. I, ; pt. II, 1967).
3. ^The engraving is illustrated in Eva-Bettina Krems, 'Die 'magnifica modestia' der Ludovisi auf dem Monte Pincio in Rom.' Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft29 (2002:105-163) p. 107, fig. 2.
4. ^Named for Guercino's ceiling fresco of Aurora
5. ^M.P. fritz, 'Der statuenhain in den Gärten der Villa Ludovisi', Daidalos65 (1997:42-51).
6. ^The name of the French garden designer André Le Nôtre became optimistically associated with Villa Ludovisi in the 19th century (as in Th. Schreiber, Die antiken Bildwerke der Villa Ludovisi, Rome 1880, p. 5).
7. ^Stendhal, Promenades dans Rome (18 April 1828), in Voyages en Italie.
8. ^Her temporary absence permitted Henry James to inspect the villa and its grounds and indulge in some snobbish daydreams: on-line text.
9. ^The Boncompagni Ludovisi financial crisis of 1893-96 is analysed in S. Palermo, Terra, città, finanza. I Boncompagni Ludovisi di Roma (1841-1896), 2008.
10. ^The sculptures had been described by Th. Schreiber, Die antiken Bildwerke der Villa Ludovisi, Rome 1880.
11. ^'Villa Aurora, Rome's best kept secret?'. Minor Sights. Retrieved 20 November 2016.

Casino Ludovisi Roma Orari Lazio

The Casino dell'Aurora is the only portion spared from nineteenth-century demolition of the Villa Ludovisi (later Villa Boncompagni Ludovisi) in Rome. Originally the Casino, erected around 1570 and enlarged in the nineteenth century, was a three-story structure on a cruciform ground plan. During the pontificate of Pope Gregory XV Ludovisi the villa and its casino were used mainly for official functions such as dinners for the college of cardinals. The Casino was decorated by paintings on the ground floor and the second floor in the seventeenth century.

The ceiling of the central room on the ground floor was painted by Guercino depicting Aurora on Her Triumphal Chariot. This composition was a deliberate response to Guido Reni's Aurora in the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi in Rome. Guercino's coworker was Agostino Tassi who was responsible for the architecture (quadratura) painted in fresco technique. (Guercino painted in tempera instead of fresco.)

In the Stanza del Caminetto, a room adjacent to the central room, the centre of the ceiling shows a wreath of putti, the documented work by Antonio Circignani, called il Pomarancio (1560-1620). It is framed by four landscape pictures painted by Paul Bril, Giovanni Battista Viola, Domenichino, and Guercino. These were produced in a kind of competition between the four painters.

The ceiling painting in the former library on the ground floor, painted by Giovanni Luigi Valesio, depicts crowds of putti with intertwining bands whose isolated letters produce Cardinal Ludovisi's name and title.

The ceiling painting in the Sala della Fama, the central hall on the second floor, is entirely allegorical. The central picture is designed as a fictive opening with only a few figures. In the centre hovers the personification of Fame in billowing robes, holding in her outstretched hands an extremely long trumpet and an olive branch as a symbol of peace. In the lower part of the picture space personifications of Honour (Honos) and Virtue (Virtus) are seated on a dark gray cloud.

A tiny and very low room on the second floor, a space that the owner Ludovico Ludovisi used as a 'studiolo,' contains the only wall painting by Caravaggio.

In its combination of heraldic and allegorical elements, the pictorial program in the Casino dell'Aurora anticipates the pictorial idiom later perfected by Pietro da Cortona in the Palazzo Barberini.