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Updated: May 14, 2025
<i>April 27th</i>. A morning with L. B. at Villa Ludovisi, which we agreed that we shouldn't soon forget. The villa now belongs to the King, who has lodged his morganatic wife there. There is nothing so blissfully <i>right</i> in Rome, nothing more consummately consecrated to style.
"They joined their companions and walked through the woods of Villa Ludovisi, which at that time belonged to Cardinal Cicognara. The morning passed all too swiftly for the amorous sculptor, but it was crowded with incidents which laid bare to him the coquetry, the weakness, the daintiness, of that pliant, inert soul.
The porter went down to his lodge, took off his old linen jacket and put on his best coat and cap, put some change into his pocket, went out and turned the key of the lock in the postern, and then stumped off towards the Piazza Sant' Apollinare to get a cab, for there was no time to be lost. It was eight o'clock when he rang at the smart new house in the Via Ludovisi.
It was not only on the castle fields, but at the Porta San Giovanni, the Porta San Lorenzo, the Villa Ludovisi, and on the heights of the Viminal and the Esquiline that unfinished, empty districts were already crumbling amidst the weeds of their deserted streets. After two thousand years of prodigious fertility the soil really seemed to be exhausted.
One warm, still day, late in the Roman autumn, our two young men were sitting beneath one of the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi. They had been spending an hour in the mouldy little garden-house, where the colossal mask of the famous Juno looks out with blank eyes from that dusky corner which must seem to her the last possible stage of a lapse from Olympus.
The statue was in the possession of Cardinal Ludovisi as early as 1633, along with a group closely allied in style, representing a Gaul and his wife, but nothing is certainly known as to the time and place of its discovery.
The line encircling them includes the most hilly part of the mediæval city; beginning at the Porta Salaria, it runs through the new quarter, formerly Villa Ludovisi, to the Piazza Barberini, thence by the Tritone to the Corso, by the Via Marforio, skirting the eastern side of the Capitoline Hill and the eastern side of the Roman Forum to the Colosseum, which it does not include; on almost to the Lateran, back again, so as to include the Basilica, by San Stefano Rotondo, and out by the Navicella to the now closed Porta Metronia.
The mamma and the queer old gentleman, moreover, are a pledge of her reality. Who are they all?" "The Prince and Princess Ludovisi and the principessina," suggested Rowland. "There are no such people," said Roderick. "Besides, the little old man is not the papa." Rowland smiled, wondering how he had ascertained these facts, and the young sculptor went on.
An hour before Aurora had opened her porte cochère to Phoebus, and those sleek piebald coursers whose portraits are to be seen in the Ludovisi and Ruspigliosi palaces, all the vetturini and cabmen of Rome had already opened theirs; and while some were adjusting misfitting harness to every specimen of horseflesh that could be procured for the occasion, others were trundling out from their black recesses in stable and coach-house, every mis-shapen vehicle that permitted of being fastened to their backs, in order to proceed out of the Porta Salara betimes.
A town was sketched out over the vast estate of the Villa Ludovisi, from the Porta Pia to the Porta Salaria and even as far as Sant' Agnese. And then came an attempt to make quite a little city, with church, school, and market, arise all at once on the fields of the Castle of Sant' Angelo.
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