Villa Aldobrandini

Villa Aldobrandini is a villa in Frascati, Italy, built on a hillside overlooking the valley toward Rome, which earned it the name Belvedere. The original structure was built in 1550 by the Roman prelate Alessandro Rufini. Pope Clement VIII gave the property to his nephew, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, in 1598, and the cardinal commissioned the architect Giacomo della Porta to redesign it; after della Porta's death in 1603 the work was continued by Carlo Maderno and Giovanni Fontana over roughly twenty years. The finished villa carries a seventeenth century facade with a double gallery on the rear elevation, spiral staircases, and the large exedra of its Water Theatre, fed by an eight kilometer aqueduct built to supply the fountains. The interior holds paintings by Mannerist and Baroque artists including Taddeo Zuccari, Federico Zuccari, Cavalier d'Arpino and Domenichino, and the grounds are entered through a monumental gate designed by Carlo Francesco Bizzaccheri in the early eighteenth century. The villa remains owned and lived in by the Aldobrandini family, making its garden the only grand Papal era garden in the area not owned by the state. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/