POPE’S VILLA

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 995, 11 June 1930, Page 6

POPE’S VILLA

Great View Over Sea and Lake HISTORIC BUILDING For the Alpinist Pope it was a great privation to pass summer after summer in the sun-baked palace and gardens of the Vatican, and one of the advantages of the Lateran Treaty has been to secure for His Holiness a suitable summer retreat states the Rome correspondent of a London paper. The new acquisition is Villa Barberini, which was also built for Urban VIII. and, after being three hundred years in the possession of the Barberini family, now returns to the Church under the terms of the Lateran Treaty. Villa Barberini is famous neither for size nor architecture but it is unique for the wide view it commands over the Compagna and the Tyrrhenian sea and on either side over the Alban lake, with the wooded crest of Monte Cavo reflected in its deep, still waters. To sit in the upstairs drawing-room between a double view of such romantic beauty provides one of those sensations of which Italy is so lavish. It is more in keeping with the Renaissance than with our prosaic age for a Pope to own a garden for his walks and meditations so full of pagan relics. Its shaded terraced grounds and long ilex avenue occupy the site of Domitian’s villa; and tangible proofs of imperial glories are seen on every side. Broken antique statues, fragments of architectural ornaments, gargantuan vases and graceful fountains shine between ilex foliage and flowering camellia trees; reticulated brick-work still supports the face of a hill-side, through the crest of which Domitian tunnelled passages to gain vistas of the Alban lake; and lower down the hill stands a magnificent long portico, with remains of a coffered ceiling.

Other imperial and patrician villas w r ere built on these vineyard slopes which Virgil made sacred in the Aeneid. A garden terrace now runs above the portico, which is reached by a steep flight or stone steps. Will Plus XI. banish the classical fragments from under the ilex trees? If he sweeps them into a dreary museum he cannot dispel the associations of Castel Gandolfo with Alba Longa and a hundred legends of ancient Rome.

But there are other memories: the Pope has only to look down from the great garden-terrace to remember that in a niche of Domitian’s nvmphaeum a fourteenth century artist has painted scenes representing the discovery of the True Cross; and, looking still further into the plain, he will see the Via Appia and remember the story of St. Peter's meeting v'ith Christ when he was fleeing from Rome and martyrdom.