Villa Lante historical timeline

Villa Lante was built by two cardinals who never worked together, took its name from a third family that arrived a century late, and lost a maze, a wood and most of a war before it reached the Italian state. The garden survived all of it largely intact because the water system it was built around still runs.

Chronology

1. 1560s Cardinal Gianfrancesco Gambara commissions the villa and work begins on the right-hand casino, inside an existing walled hunting ground known as the barco. The design is attributed to Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, who had been working at the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola. Tommaso Ghinucci, a hydraulics engineer and architect from Siena, is brought in to make the water work; Pirro Ligorio is also consulted.
2. 1581 A fresco in the loggia of the Gambara casino, of this year or earlier, shows the villa complete -- the main evidence that the whole scheme was conceived at once rather than extended piecemeal. The first casino and upper garden are finished, but work then stops for the rest of Gambara's life.
3. 1587 Gambara dies. He is succeeded as Apostolic Administrator of Viterbo by Cardinal Alessandro Peretti di Montalto, the seventeen-year-old nephew of Pope Sixtus V, who completes the project and builds the second casino.
4. 1609 A perspective plan records a wooded area of walks and vistas towards obelisks, plus a maze. None of it survives.
5. 1600s The villa passes to Ippolito Lante Montefeltro della Rovere, Duke of Bomarzo, and takes the name it still carries. It is about a hundred years old by then.
6. 1656 The last cardinal owner dies and the property passes to the family of Duke Ippolito Lante, who hold it for many generations.
7. 1800s The family fortunes are revived by an American duchess, a daughter of Thomas Davies of New York. The ducal family lives in the Gambara casino and keeps the Montalto for guests. Camellias and other ericaceous shrubs are added to the Fontana dei Lumini terrace in this century.
8. 1944 The gardens and casini are heavily damaged by Allied bombing after the fall of Rome.
9. 1900s A long restoration programme is completed in the late 20th century under Angelo Cantoni. The villa becomes part of the Grandi Giardini Italiani.
10. 2011 Villa Lante is voted the most beautiful park in Italy.
11. 2014 The villa, property of the Republic of Italy, comes under the Polo museale del Lazio in December. The same year it appears on a 5-euro commemorative silver coin in the series "Ville e giardini d'Italia".
12. 2019 The Polo museale del Lazio becomes the Direzione regionale Musei in December, and remains the body that runs the villa.

• Wikipedia