Villa Farnesina Private Tour

Built in the early sixteenth century, is one of the noblest and most harmonious creations of the Italian Renaissance. It is a masterpiece in which architectural design and pictorial decoration fuse into a single marvellous synthesis. The sober volumetric and spatial layout of the Villa, devised by the architect Baldassarre Peruzzi, is indeed the perfect setting for its rich interior decoration, boasting frescos by great masters such as Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi known as Sodoma, and Peruzzi himself. Before moving into the Farnesina, Agostino Chigi lived in a house in Via dei Banchi with his young wife Margherita Saracini, who died childless in 1508. He then embarked on an affair with the courtesan Imperia, famous for her beauty and culture, who bore him a daughter, Lucrezia. But even before the death of Imperia in 1511 he had begun to court Margherita Gonzaga, the natural daughter of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; he failed to pull this marriage off however, even though he had promised to give up all his business interests so as to appease the prejudices of the Mantuan court. In 1511, on a debt-collecting mission to Venice, he met a young girl of humble origins, Francesca Ordeaschi, and lived with her as her common-law husband until 1519. In that year on the feast of St Augustine, no doubt prompted by a sense his own mortality, he decided to regularise his position with a proper wedding and at the same time dictated his Will. The wedding banquet was a memorable event, but no less sumptuous were the many feasts that Agostino gave, especially in the last years of his life, when he welcomed into his new home the foremost personalities of the age: poets, princes, cardinals, even the pope himself. The chroniclers record for example that in 1518, on the occasion of the christening of the eldest child Lorenzo Leone, gold and silver vessels used for the banquet were flung into the Tiber as a sign of munificence. After its acquisition by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese the Younger, and after the death of his nephew Odoardo who inherited it, the Villa was abandoned, being occasionally lent to important visitors to Rome such as Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Frederick of Assia-Darmstadt, Queen Christina of Sweden and various ambassadors of Louis XIV. In 1735 the Villa was bequeathed by Elisabetta Farnese to Carlo IV, King of the Two Sicilies, and became the residence of various Neapolitan ambassadors until Francesco II of Naples, having retired to Rome after his abdication, granted a 99-year lease on the Farnesina to the Spanish ambassador of Naples, Salvador Bermudez de Castro, the duke of Ripalta. Finally the Villa was acquired in 1927 by the State, which used it to house the Italian Academy and in 1944 gave it to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, housed in the nearby Palazzo Corsini.

Walk across the Ponte Sisto over the Tiber River as your guide tells you about its history