Behind a tall but relatively unostentatious iron gate in Rome, down an enticing avenue lined with neatly clipped box hedges and around a circular parterre, an opening in the green verge appears. Pass through it, and a sprawling formal garden in rococo furls, the size of a football field reveals itself to the sound of birdsong and the soft gurgle of a water fountain. Sentinel over this really rather surreal idyll, windows thrown open in the baking summer heat, is the Villa Albani Torlonia. A little-seen Roman jewel, owing to a penchant for privacy by the owners, it was built to house a staggering collection of Greek and Roman antiquities – collected by a nephew of a pope no less – Cardinal Alessandro Albani.
The fact that it is lesser known (some Romans profess they don’t know what is behind its walls) belies its historical and cultural significance. To art historians it is the cradle of the Neoclassical movement. One fresco, , by Anton Raphael Mengs, is considered the first ever truly neoclassical work and helped situate Rome at the apogee of the Grand Tour, that mythic quest for cultural enlightenment undertaken by scholars and artists around Europe in the 17th to 19th centuries. The villa’s 600-plus pieces have been sought after by the Louvre,
