Villa Mondragone

Villa Mondragone is a patrician villa on a hill above Frascati in the Alban Hills near Rome, in what is now the comune of Monte Porzio Catone. Construction began in 1573 for Cardinal Mark Sittich von Hohenems Altemps, working with the architect Martino Longhi the Elder, on a site that had earlier held a Roman villa of the Quinctilii family. Pope Gregory XIII used the villa as a summer retreat and issued there, in 1582, the papal bull that introduced the Gregorian calendar reform; the villa is said to take its name from the dragon in his coat of arms. The Borghese family later expanded the property and filled it with art and antiquities, and from 1865 to 1953 the Jesuits ran it as the Nobile Collegio Mondragone boarding school. Since 1981 it has served as a campus of the University of Rome Tor Vergata.