Villa Torlonia

Park · NomentanoRome,Italy

A banking family's ornamented park in Rome, now public, holding the house Mussolini rented for eighteen years and a smaller one covered in owls.

Villa Torlonia is a public park that was one banking family's private garden, laid out with temples, an obelisk and a purpose-built ruin. You walk in past all of it. The house on the terrace is the part people come for. Mussolini rented the whole estate in 1925 and lived here for eighteen years, until July 1943, while the prince who owned it moved into a smaller building in the trees. From 1942 the fire service dug him a shelter under the side terrace, in concrete more than a metre thick, with airtight doors and a plant to filter the air. The small building the prince moved into is the reason most Romans come. It began in 1840 as a mock Swiss cabin and was rebuilt from 1908 into a house covered in owls: stained glass, majolica, wrought iron and carved wood, with owls, ivy, swallows and roses worked into every window. Its rooms are small and domestic, decorated for private life rather than for official business. Around both buildings the park is now an ordinary public one, with joggers, dogs and a lemon house serving coffee. Under the lawns lie Jewish burial galleries from the third and fourth centuries, closed to visitors.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The bunkers are a separate booked tour and often sold out — the park is free and the two museums are ticketed, but the underground shelters run only on some weekends.
Do the owl house in the middle of a bright day — every room depends on daylight coming through coloured glass, and in dull weather the colours disappear.
The two buildings are ten minutes apart across the park — the big house on the terrace and the little glass one in the trees, and it is easy to see one and leave without the other.
The grounds are a working neighbourhood park — there are lawns, benches, a playground and a café in the old lemon house, so this is a place to spend a slow afternoon rather than a quick visit.

Things to do

1
Walk the owl house room by room
Go slowly and look at the windows rather than the furniture, because there is barely any furniture left. Owls, ivy, swallows, roses and dragonflies are worked into leaded glass in every opening, and the colour they throw onto the floors changes completely from room to room as you move round the building.
2
Go down into the shelter if a tour is running
The bunker under the terrace is reached by a narrow stair and a set of steel doors. Inside there is bare concrete, a corridor, an air filtration plant and almost nothing else. It is small, low and plain, with nothing decorative in it at all.
3
Find the false ruin in the trees
The nineteenth-century layout scattered follies through the park: a mock temple, a broken column, a raised stone platform with steps. Walk the paths away from the main buildings and look for masonry built to look older than it is. The family wanted a garden that came with its own history.