By acquiring nearly twenty thousand acres of countryside near the town of Frascati (twelve miles southeast of Rome) and refurbishing three residences on this land, the nephew of Pope Paul V, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, both created a papal retreat for his uncle and established a vast agricultural enterprise that was administered from the principal residence on this land, the Villa Mondragone. In Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Rome: Villa Culture at Frascati in the Borghese Era, Tracy Ehrlich contends that with these initiatives, Scipione Borghese made a comprehensive claim for his family’s nobility, seigniory, virtue, and elegance. Perhaps most importantly for an arriviste family of Sienese origins, Scipione sought to proclaim the Romanitas of the Borghese.

The author places her study at a rich crossroads of disciplinary inquiries. Historians of art, architecture, and literature—notable among them are James Ackerman and the late David Coffin—have shown the practice of country retreat, or villeggiatura, to be a complex social phenomenon that embraced nearly every aspect of life—economic, political, intellectual, and artistic—in Renaissance Italy. In Tuscany, the Medici used Poggio a Caiano as both a sanctuary for philosophical speculation and a locus for agricultural production. In the Veneto, investment in land became sound economic policy for the Venetian nobility as opportunities with Levantine trade dwindled in the sixteenth century. Writers and poets such as Angelo Poliziano and Jacopo Sannazaro used the country setting of the villa as an opportunity to revisit the poems of Horace, the letters of Pliny the Younger, and the genre of the pastoral.

More recently, geography-minded cultural historians such as Dennis Cosgrove, Michael Williams, and Simon Schama have explored how landscapes can be viewed as both the physical features of a countryside and the memories, myths, and meanings inspired by the land. These approaches to landscape reveal the social order and the aspirations of the people who reside in, cultivate, and ultimately shape their natural environments. These concerns play an integral role in Ehrlich’s consideration of the Borghese project in the countryside of Frascati.

The volume under review also addresses a chronological lacuna in villa studies. Despite the contributions of Ackerman and Coffin on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, relatively little has been written about the seventeenth-century rural retreat. In the past ten years, such scholars as Lilian Zirpolo and Mirka Bene∫ have begun to give us a better understanding of this period with their studies of the patronage activities of the prominent papal families of the seicento, including the Barberini and the Pamphili. Ehrlich’s book marks a significant contribution to our understanding of country retreat in the seventeenth century.

The author presents villeggiatura “alla Borghese” in four parts. The first section of the book reviews the unique sociopolitical circumstances of Rome after the return of the papacy from Avignon, which allowed families of regional prominence (such as the Farnese, Chigi, Aldobrandini, Ludovisi, Barberini, and Borghese) to vault into the elite aristocratic ranks upon their arrival in Rome. The second part places the practice of villeggiatura within the context of papal patronage and demonstrates how the sponsorship of architectural, artistic, and humanistic endeavors served both the political agenda of the Catholic monarch and the dynastic pretensions of the early modern papal family. The final two parts of the book focus on the Borghese practice of rural retreat and how Scipione Borghese’s purchase of the Mondragone estate and the refashioning of its buildings and landscape were a political and agricultural enterprise designed to express the present sovereignty of the papacy and the future seigniory of the Borghese.

In antiquity, the slopes above the town of Frascati were a locus of rural retreat crowned by the town of Tusculum (abandoned definitively in the twelfth century). The initiatives of Paul III Farnese, commemorated in a papal medal bearing the inscription TUSCULO REST [ITUTO], began a renewed papal and aristocratic interest in ancient Tusculum. This interest had a far-reaching political and cultural scope: with refurbished villas the Renaissance popes reenacted ancient Roman villeggiatura, and humanists including Flavio Biondo and Pirro Ligorio scoured the Tusculan hills for the remains of the villas of Cicero and Lucullus. The author rightly emphasizes that the reconstruction of ancient Tusculum was far more than an exercise in magnificence or a chance to revisit the arguments of Lucullus and Cicero on extravagance. Rather, the project embodied in Tusculum Restituto was central to social ascendancy in early modern Rome. Speaking of ecclesiastics who built retreats near Frascati in the mid-sixteenth century, Ehrlich writes: “Tusculum, in particular, had an aura of prestige that patrons desired; Cicero embodied not only intelligence and taste but also high social standing”(50).

Acquiring land around Frascati, the Borghese also sought to establish themselves as part of the cultural project of Tusculum Restituto. Like the Farnese with the Villa Rufina and the Aldobrandini at the Villa Belvedere, the country house at Mondragone could communicate papal splendor, humanist interests, and familial seigniory in a variety of ways.

With the purchase of the Mondragone in 1613, Scipione Borghese inherited a complex that was constructed by Martino Longhi the Elder for Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps in the 1570s and was originally designed as a papal retreat for Pope Gregory XIII Boncompagni. Building upon the ruins of an ancient Roman villa, Longhi constructed a vast terrace that served as a platform for two structures: a casino that stood upon the northern edge of the terrace, and a secondary residence, called the Retirata, that was nestled into the hillside at the southern end of the terrace.

In part 3 of the book (chapters 5 and 6), Ehrlich explores the symbolic potential of villa architecture and argues that Scipione and his architects modified the preexisting structures of the complex to create a retreat that accommodated both otium and negotium: the Mondragone would be a place of both rural retreat and a staging ground for receptions and papal display. The modifications of the Flemish-born Jan van Zanten (executed between 1614 and 1620) responded to these needs.

Perhaps the most notable changes to the complex were the addition of a gallery that connected the casino to the Retirata, and the construction of a giardino segreto that flanked the east edge of the terrace. With these two spaces, Scipione Borghese and his architect assembled a complex that combined a comprehensive array of architectural types that were readily associated with urban, suburban, and rural residences. With a pair of split ramps that acceded to an exedral water theater, the author contends that van Zanten’s garden appropriated the principal design elements of the Belvedere Court in the Vatican. While the unified and corridorlike space of the Mondragone gallery was a unique architectural form among Frascati villas, it was a signature feature of princely palaces in Rome and beyond. Ehrlich cites the examples of the upper corridor of the Belvedere Court in the Vatican, the gallery of the Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill, and the French châteaux of Fontainebleau, Blois, and Gaillon to make a compelling case that van Zanten’s addition transformed the Mondragone into a complex with more ambitious aspirations than a mere country residence: the gallery expressed the Mondragone’s function as a princely estate.

While the architectural forms of the Mondragone complex spoke of country seclusion and princely aspirations, the land included in this estate also embodied the family’s princely aspirations, but in different ways.¹ The final part of the book explores how Scipione consciously sought to shape the strategies of land administration that would assure the Borghese of noble status and economic security for centuries to come.

As twenty-eight of the ninety-eight properties purchased by the Borghese were fiefs, the family advanced to the noble titles of marquis, duke, and prince several times over. The first major rank promotions came in 1607, when the Borghese purchased the fief of Rignano that carried a hereditary ducal title, and in 1609, when Paul V raised the Borghese fief of Vivaro to a principate. With these hereditary titles came the noble privileges of control over local markets and wine production, hunting rights, and jurisdiction over the castelli and their territories. While the financial administration of the territories was normally based in the fief-towns, Scipione shifted many aspects of the baronial administration to the Mondragone itself rather than to the towns of Montecompatri and Monteporzio. Ehrlich argues that this shift gave the villa yet another important function and, perhaps more importantly, emphasized Borghese sovereignty over their territories and ultimately the identity of the Borghese family as both noble and Roman.

The integration of villa and fief was manifested topographically and poetically. The author argues that Scipione consciously orchestrated these manifestations in an effort to assert the nobility of the Borghese. Upon assuming control of the Mondragone estate, he undertook significant landscaping in addition to architectural renovation. Following the dictates of Renaissance treatises such as Michele Tarraglia’s De Agricultura (1490), Anton Francesco Doni’s Le Ville (1566), and Pierre Belon’s De Neglecta Stirpium Cultura (1589), Scipione planted a variety of trees, including ilex, elm, mulberry, and cypress, along the roads that led to the villas to confer magnificence on a country palace. On the properties themselves, Scipione converted the forested lands below the villas into vineyards and orchards and replanted a mixed forest above the villas. Ehrlich argues that this replanting, while establishing the Mondragone as a center of agricultural production, had far-reaching scenographic implications for the villas and their relation to the countryside. From the terraces of the Villa Mondragone, the Borghese and their guests could enjoy an unencumbered view toward the plains below the Tusculan hill, surveying Borghese farmland immediately below and Rome in the distance.

This scenographic manipulation of architecture and landscape also inspired a poetic integration of villa and fief. The poems of Lelio Guidiccioni invited guests to enjoy the beauty and expressiveness of the landscape of the Mondragone. Emulating the pastoral tradition of antiquity, Guidiccioni and his readers transformed the physical landscape of the villa into the idyllic and imaginative realm of Arcadia.

By combining landscape, architecture, land administration, and ultimately the poetic tradition of the pastoral, Scipione made a comprehensive claim of Borghese nobility, sovereignty, virtue, elegance, and Romanitas. Tracy Ehrlich’s well-orchestrated study, furthermore, provides a new depth and subtlety to what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz would call a “thick description” of villa construction in early modern Rome. Most importantly, Ehrlich places the rural activities of the Borghese on equal footing with their urban initiatives: it is now impossible to appreciate the urban projects of Rome’s elite families without considering their rural enterprises as well.

The range of Erlich’s observations and their subtlety deserve consolidation in a concluding chapter that is unfortunately lacking in the book. Had there been a conclusion, one would have liked to see some conjectures as to the place of the Borghese enterprise within the practices of villeggiatura and land use in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author seems to respond to an observation made by David Coffin in the conclusion of The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). There, Coffin hinted at a dramatic change in rural retreat at the end of the sixteenth century: landscape began to assume a more prominent role in villa architecture. He hypothesized that this shift was symptomatic of larger changes in agricultural practices in the Roman campagna. The villa enterprise of Scipione Borghese seems to be a prime example of such land consolidation, and, in addition, Ehrlich notes a marked programmatic change in garden architecture between the Aldobrandini Villa Belvedere and the Borghese Villa Mondragone. Is this change in program the beginning of a broader trend, or is it an idiosyncrasy of the Borghese project? In the opening chapter of the book she notes that the Borghese purchased ninety-eight individual territories, whereas the Barberini and the Pamphili purchased fifty-six and thirty-one territories respectively. A quick review of villa activity of the popes who followed Paul V, especially Urban VIII, Innocent X, and Alexander VII, would have been helpful in answering this question.

Nevertheless, Ehrlich’s insightful analysis has covered much new ground. The roots of the author’s method are discernible in James Ackerman’s 1982 essay, “The Geopolitics of Venetan Architecture in the Time of Titian.” In describing an architectural history that focuses on political, social, and economic history, Ackerman wrote:

Works of architecture inevitably are generated by the expressed needs and desires of patrons, whose visions are formed in the context of the group of which they are members; they are not simply the product of the creative inspiration of designers, as they appear in so many traditional studies, but of the interaction of a program framed by the individual client and by the traditions of his group and the responses of an architect selected by the client.²

Ehrlich has marshaled a broad range of disciplinary techniques to make such an exploration possible and has demonstrated the richness and incisiveness that are possible when art historians give serious attention the needs, desires, and visions of a patron.