Villa Vecchia, the first Tusculan villa of Monte Porzio

Everyone knows Villa Mondragone. Few people know that, a little further on, stands the villa where it all began. It is called Villa Vecchia, the Old Villa, for exactly that reason: it was there first, and when Mondragone was built beside it, it became “the old one”.

What is Villa Vecchia?

It is one of the Tusculan villas, the residences that cardinals and papal families built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the hills between Frascati and Monte Porzio Catone. It lies in the municipality of Monte Porzio, near Villa Mondragone and the Barco Borghese, and was built on the remains of a Roman villa: a long stretch of Roman road can still be seen in the garden.

Who built it?

It started small. Around 1560 (the sources give 1558 or 1560) Cardinal Giovanni Ricci di Montepulciano had a small country retreat built here, with a farm estate.

Then the villa changed owners and size:

• 1562. It was bought by Cardinal Ranuccio Farnese, who had it restored by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola. It was the Farnese family’s first residence in the area and took the name Villa Tusculana. Its other name, Villa Angelina, comes according to the sources from the cardinal’s title, cardinal of Sant’Angelo.
• Late 1560s. It passed to Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps, who turned it into a real villa with the work of architects such as Vignola and Martino Longhi and many painters. Pope Gregory XIII sometimes used it as a summer residence.
• 1573-1574. Altemps built the new, large Villa Mondragone next to it. From then on the older villa was called Villa Vecchia.
• 1613. Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V, bought up all the Altemps properties, this villa included, as we tell in the history of the town.

What happened to it in the twentieth century?

During the Second World War the villa was used as a German military depot and was hit in the bombing of 1943-1944. The frescoes were lost. After the war it was rebuilt and for a time became a convent of nuns.

Can you visit it today?

Villa Vecchia is privately owned and is now a hotel. It is not a museum or a monument open to the public.

In short

• What: the oldest Tusculan villa in the Mondragone area, in the municipality of Monte Porzio Catone.
• Built: around 1560 for Cardinal Giovanni Ricci di Montepulciano.
• Owners: the Farnese from 1562 (Villa Tusculana or Angelina, restored by Vignola), then the Altemps, from 1613 the Borghese.
• Why “Vecchia”: because Villa Mondragone was built next to it in 1573-1574.
• Today: a private hotel; the frescoes were lost in the bombing of 1943-1944.