Casino Borghese

After the purchases of land and vineyards and the concession of the Acqua Felice in the first decade of the 17th century, the construction of the palace took place substantially in one year, from 1612, while the decoration with the works of sculpture, the construction of the aviary by Girolamo Rainaldi (in 1617-19) and the arrangement of the gardens lasted until about 1620.
The merits of the architecture are mainly attributable to Flaminio Ponzio, an outstanding architect trusted by the papal and cardinal. Ponzio invented the ratio of the volumes of the rooms, the Doric order of the external architecture, and freed the architecture of the palace from the traditional appearance of villas, which was more monolithic and enclosed, allowing the projecting parts at the top (towers) to surprisingly emerge in a dynamic relationship with the order of the windows and doors communicating with the garden paths on all four sides.
The Villa Pinciana was built to be a museum, a place of culture, for the exhibition of exemplary images of ancient and modern art, for music, studies in a small library, but also for the contemplation of nature (with rare plants and animals), of fossil specimens and finally of the modern technology of the time (e.g. automata, mirrors, bizarre lenses and peculiar clocks).
The Villa administered a farm with vineyards, vegetable gardens, hunting, stables, sheds, pigeon coops in the towers (the accesses to which are still visible), a large aviary, an ice house, a wine cave and even silkworm culture. The rarest plants, imported from Holland or the New Indies, and a zoological garden completed the Theatre of the Universe desired by Cardinal Scipione.
The luminous façade of the Villa amidst the green of the garden appears today to have been restored, and compared to 1984 is closer to its original 17th century splendour. A vibrant marble colour has been restored to the façade with lighter background mirrors, and the pilasters and stringcourses in an ivory colour close to travertine. This colour emphasises the idea of old-fashioned architecture as well as the Doric order of the pillars and the balanced proportions of the whole. An important intervention concerns the faithful reconstruction of F. Ponzio's two-flight staircase, which will be crowned by a copy of an ancient vase with two cornucopias (originals in the Louvre). The reconstruction of the two-flight staircase in place of the previous late eighteenth-century truncated pyramid staircase only now makes it possible to use the basement for additional services. The shutters that altered the original rhythm of the order of the windows have recently been removed. All the statues and busts on the façade, which were seriously degraded due to a lack of routine maintenance, attacked by rainwater, wind, dust and lichen, have been restored.