Villa Pamphilj (1630- 1670): Family Gardens and Land in Papal Rome

This dissertation concerns the meanings attributed by Romans to the large estate-villas built in Rome during the century after 1570. These estates, of which Villa Pamphilj forms the most important example, constituted a special group, both socially and formally: they were built by the new papal aristocracy that began to form in late sixteenth-century Roman society, taking over the social rank of the old baronial families. The development of Villa Pamphilj out of a small family vineyard on the Janiculum hill into a park of some 260 acres enclosed by a wall in 1670 began with the papal election of Innocent X Pamphilj in 1644. In this type of estate-villa, the gardens and enclosed landscape predominated over the architectural elements. Seventeenth-century Roman villa-gardens have been neglected in the literature, in part because their land component cannot be explained by the iconographical approaches that have been meaningfully applied to Roman Renaissance villas such as the Villa Lante at Bagnaia and the Orsini gardens at Bomarzo. It is the claim of this thesis that when Romans and informed visitors looked at an estate such as Villa Pamphilj, they could read in it the changing structure of Roman society after 1570. The thesis charts the rise of the Pamphilj in Rome through the papacy of Innocent X, analyses the gardens of Villa Pamphilj, and reconstructs the 25 properties acquired for the estate. It also interprets Villa Pamphilj as a form of Nero's Golden House, an estate built close to the urban center. These results present a new context for the study of the seventeenth-century Roman villa-garden, namely the intersection of social and geographical dimensions in early modern Rome.