Villa Ludovisi

Villa Ludovisi was a suburban villa in Rome, Italy, built in the 1620s on the site of the ancient Gardens of Sallust near the Porta Salaria, for Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, who assembled the property from vineyards bought from Giovanni Antonio Orsini and other owners. The villa itself was completed within thirty months to designs attributed to Domenichino, and it housed the cardinal's celebrated collection of Roman antiquities and sculpture alongside frescoes by Domenichino, Guercino and other painters, including Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture Pluto and Persephone. The writer Stendhal praised its gardens in 1828 as among the most beautiful in the world. Financial difficulties forced the last owner to sell the estate to developers in 1885, and the villa was divided into building lots and largely demolished, with only the garden pavilion known as the Casino dell'Aurora surviving; the new Via Veneto was later built across the former grounds. The surrounding Ludovisi neighborhood of Rome takes its name from the cardinal and his lost villa. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/