Villa Aldobrandini historical timeline

What a visitor meets here is a reward in built form. The villa above Frascati was handed to a papal nephew for a diplomatic and military service, and he spent twenty years and an eight-kilometre aqueduct turning it into a place that could receive a pope. The result is still owned and lived in by his successors -- the only one of the grand papal villas not in state hands -- which is why the thing a visitor stands in front of is the Water Theatre and the park, and not the room of Apollo.

Chronology

1. pre-Roman Large squared blocks found in the courtyard, probably from an Etruscan-Latin temple, show occupation long before the villa. It stands on earlier Latin and Roman remains, and tradition puts the villa of Lucullus on this ground.
2. 1550 The original villa is built. Everything later is a conversion of it rather than a fresh start.
3. 1595 The peace treaty with France is concluded, the negotiations behind it being one of the two services for which the villa was given away three years later.
4. 1598 Clement VIII gives the villa to his nephew Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, for the French negotiations and for his part in annexing Ferrara to the Papal States, and the cardinal commissions Giacomo della Porta to make it somewhere a cardinal could both live and entertain a pope. Work starts the same year, and at the end of the century he buys up the land that now forms the park. The inscription under the nymphaeum balustrade still calls him the conqueror of Ferrara.
5. 1600s Work runs on for twenty years after della Porta's death, on villa and garden together, under Carlo Maderno -- who added the loggia, and who completed St Peter's -- with the fountains by a Fontana. Maderno and Orazio Olivieri build the Teatro delle Acque, 2,500 square metres of fountains and terraces, and Aldobrandini drives an aqueduct 8 km from the Modena Spring on Monte Algido to feed it. Both still work.
6. early 1700s Carlo Francesco Bizzaccheri's monumental gate is added to the grounds -- a late insertion into a composition otherwise finished a century before.
7. 1700s On the extinction of the Aldobrandini line the villa is contested between the Borghese and Pamphili heirs and ends with the second-born branch of the Borghese, who take the Aldobrandini surname back up. The family in the house today is that line.
8. 1786-1788 Goethe's Italian journey brings him here among many Grand Tour travellers, who agreed on the epithet Regina Villarum. It is the reputation the villa still trades on.
9. 1921 The British royal family visit, in a sequence of callers the family records as including popes, sovereigns and presidents.
10. 1943-1944 American bombing during the Allied invasion wrecks the top of the garden and damages the fountains of the Teatro delle Acque. The upper garden has been derelict ever since and is not part of what can be walked.
11. late 1940s The present owner's father repairs the damaged fountains -- in cement, which is the problem the next restoration had to undo.
12. 2011 Prince Camillo Aldobrandini begins restoration work on fountains that were by then in poor condition. The water theatre a visitor sees is the subject of that campaign.

Survival and restoration

The villa's survival problem is not age but ordnance and concrete. American bombing during the Allied invasion in the Second World War left the top of the garden derelict -- it has stayed that way for eighty years -- and damaged the fountains of the Teatro delle Acque, the one element the whole composition exists for. The repairs made shortly afterwards by the present owner's father used cement, and by 2011 the fountains were in poor condition, which is when Prince Camillo Aldobrandini started the current restoration.

What has protected everything else is continuous private ownership. The house has never been a museum: it passed from the Aldobrandini to a Borghese branch that took the name back, and it is still lived in, which is why the interior -- the room of Apollo with its mosaics and Domenichino frescoes, the Cavalier d'Arpino work, the Zuccari paintings, Landini's Clement VIII -- is closed to visitors rather than displayed. The park is visitable on application to Frascati's tourist office, and the villa is let for weddings, filming and events, which is how a privately held monument of this size pays for itself.

The hydraulics are the part that cannot be left alone. A 2,500-square-metre water theatre on a hillside depends on an eight-kilometre aqueduct from the Modena Spring on Monte Algido; the garden is downstream of a piece of seventeenth-century civil engineering, and when that stops, the garden stops being what it was built to be.

• Wikipedia