Villa Albani Torlonia Architetture Collezioni Giardino

Devoted to a spectacular place and the artistic heritage that it preserves, the monograph was commissioned by the Fondazione Torlonia to retrace a fascinating history of art, culture and beauty.

The Torlonia family bought Villa Albani in Rome in 1866, and has preserved the architectural complex intact to this day, restoring it and extending the collection and gardens. The restoration work and the new research conducted have made it possible in this publication to reconstruct an integral and up-to-date picture of the events affecting the villa built by the architect Carlo Marchionni (1702 – 1786), which embodies the union of art and nature, using ancient materials and modern artworks to fulfil that ideal model of the villa of leisured ease, intended for intellectual pleasure in a community of cultivated people, inspired by the classical dream of Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692-1779). A dream shared with the leading intellectuals of the time, who gathered in the “Cenacle of Villa Albani”, giving rise to that antiquarian taste that promoted the European Neoclassical movement. The villa was designed to house Cardinal Alessandro’s outstanding collection of antiquities and was fostered by the fruitful dialogue with Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), the great architect and cartographer Giovanni Battista Nolli (1701-1756) for the design of the garden, with Angelo Strigini for the system of fountains and with Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) for the arrangement of the collection. The essays in this volume, entrusted to the finest scholars, and the numerous entries on individual works, chosen from among the most significant items, for the first time reveal the thousand faces of Villa Albani Torlonia to the general public, thanks to the spectacular photo shoot commissioned by the Fondazione Torlonia, with numerous images by the great photographer Massimo Listri.