Villa Torlonia, in Rome, was begun for the banker Giovanni Torlonia by the neo-Classic architect Giuseppe Valadier in 1806 and finished for his son Alessandro. After a period of disuse this was the state residence of Mussolini in the nineteen twenties. He paid an annual rent of one lira. Mussolini and Prince Torlonia constructed a bomb shelter in the 3rd and 4th century Jewish catacombs that lie beneath the villa's famous landscaped park. The Villa houses part of the Torlonia collection of neo-Classic sculpture. In the park is a kiosk in the Moorish taste, one of thirteen garden pavilions representing exotic parts of the world. Villa Torlonia, the most famous 'English' landscape garden in Italy, became a part of the public park system of Rome in 1978.
At Frascati the grand Baroque terraced gardens and fountains of the Villa Torlonia, Frascati, bought by prince Torlonia in the 19th century, provided subjects for watercolors by the American painter John Singer Sargent. The land the Villa was built on belonged to the Abbey of Grottaferrata, which donated it in 1563 to Annibal Caro, who commissioned a small villa where he spent the last years of his life, translating the Aeneid. (In 1896, Prince Leopoldo Torlonia placed a memorial stone to remember this event.)
In 1571, Beatrice Cenci bought the villa, which passed in 1596 to Cardinal Tolomeo Galli, Secretary of State under pope Gregory XIII. who commissioned the flrst enlargement works.
In 1607, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Paul V's nephew, took possession of the Villa; he enlarged and embellished the Villa. The waterworks used to feed the fountains of the Villa and the spectacular Theatre of the Waters dates to that period (the works were carried out by Giovanni Fontana). Other 17th and 18th century owners were Stefano Colonna, the Conti family, and the Sforza Cesarini family.
The old Villa was almost completely destroyed on September 8, 1943, when Frascati was bombed.
