ROME - With a sweep of her manicured hand, Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi draws 20 pairs of eyes upward to the salon ceiling, one of many treasures in the Villa Aurora, the family home in the heart of Rome.

"This is Guercino, this is Bril, this is Viola, this is Domenichino and in the center, this is Pomarancio," the princess said, identifying the contributing artists as her guests craned their necks for a better view of the frescoes.

To the princess, an American formerly known as Rita Jenrette, the sitting room is a favorite place to relax with her husband, Prince Nicolò Boncompagni Ludovisi, whom she married last year. The somber portraits of his ancestors - Popes Gregory XIII and Gregory XV - decorate the warm butterscotch walls. (The family's title comes from Piombino, an area on the western coast that was a princely state until Napoleon abolished it in 1801.)

After moving into Villa Aurora seven years ago, Ms. Jenrette urged the very private prince to open the house to visitors. Today, this onetime U.S. congressional wife and businesswoman often gives tours herself, recounting the history of the 16th-century house and its collection of masterpieces including ceilings by Caravaggio and Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, better known by his nickname of Guercino. His fresco "Aurora" lends the villa its name.

"Nicolò's extremely private and I respect that," said the princess, "but I also felt we could bring life back here, and happiness and joy to so many people who would not have had the chance to see these masterpieces."

Count Stefano Aluffi-Pentini, whose company, A Private View of Italy, organizes exclusive art tours in Rome said the villa's artwork made it particularly distinctive. "To have a ceiling by Guercino and the only ceiling by Caravaggio makes it the most special residence of this kind in Italy," he said.

The villa was built as a hunting lodge in 1570 and expanded in 1858 to its current living space of 3,000 square meters, or 32,000 square feet. There are nine rooms with ceilings painted by the leading artists of the day, two elevators, nine bathrooms and a cavernous basement kitchen.

In the ornate ingresso, or entry, sits the small red velvet throne of the powerful Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew of Pope Gregory XV, who bought the villa in 1621. In the chapel is a rosewood table handed down from Ugo Boncompagni, the future Pope Gregory XIII and father of the Gregorian calendar.

In his 1909 memoir "Italian Hours," Henry James admired the rooms, "all pleased by their shape, by a lovely proportion, by a mass of ornamentation on the high concave ceilings." From the rooftop loggia, James wrote that he enjoyed sweeping views of the Eternal City "against a sky of faded sapphire."

Visits to the villa have been in high demand this year, with Italy marking the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio's death. In 1597, the villa's second owner, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, commissioned Caravaggio to paint the ceiling of his small second-floor alchemy lab.

The oil-on-plaster work, "Jupiter, Pluto and Neptune," depicts the three gods, with Jupiter moving a translucent orb stamped with signs of the zodiac. The earth and the sun are visible beneath. The work is believed to be a reference to the then-heretical theory that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of the universe, the princess said.

The ceiling - the only one Caravaggio is known to have painted - was eventually covered over and then rediscovered in 1968, when chips in the paint revealed a face strikingly similar to Caravaggio's own. In fact, the Baroque master had painted his own dark features on the faces of the three gods.

But Caravaggio is only part of the story of Villa Aurora, which is all that is left of a much larger property called Villa Ludovisi. That estate, with its lush gardens, fountains and statuary on 36-hectares, or 89 acres, was a required stop through the centuries for artists, writers and wealthy travelers on the Grand Tour. The property was subdivided in the 1880s, and the gardens excavated to create the neighborhood now bisected by Via Veneto.

In 1829, Stendhal wrote of strolling "with delight among the grand avenues of green trees" and Goethe so loved a statue of the goddess Juno that he had it copied for his house in Germany. At the time, the star attraction wasn't the Caravaggio but Guercino's "Aurora," depicting the goddess tossing flowers from her horse-drawn chariot as she ushers in the sunlight. The tableau's rich blues and reds are still vibrant today.

The villa and its art is conservatively estimated at €670 million, or about $844 million, said the prince, 69. He has fended off occasional requests to buy the property, which he wants to preserve for his three sons and seven grandchildren.

The years have taken a toll on the villa, with water damage to the frescoes, and to the ancient statues in the garden, some of which date to 500 BC. After years of negotiation with the Italian government, which has designated the house a national treasure, a €10 million restoration finally began last year.

It took 14 months to lay a new roof and to repair and repaint the exterior, returning the pumpkin-colored villa to its original color of cream with a hint of pink.

The extent of the interior damage is still to be determined, but at least two more years' work is expected. A second Guercino ceiling, "La Fama," is riven with cracks caused by water damage. And chipped plaster throughout the house offers colorful peeks at old frescoes long since covered over. Samples are going to be taken to determine if any of the hidden works are worth restoring.

"It's not a renewal - it's a conservative restoration," the prince said.

With the details of real estate filling their days, it's no surprise perhaps that a land deal brought the couple together.

In January 2003, Ms. Jenrette, then a Manhattan real estate broker, flew to Rome with a client interested in building a hotel on one of the prince's properties outside Rome. For Ms. Jenrette, the property business was the latest career move in a varied résumé that included U.S. congressional researcher, country singer, model, actress and wife to former U.S. Representative John W. Jenrette Jr., a South Carolina Democrat who was imprisoned in the 1980s Abscam public corruption scandal. Afterward, she divorced Mr. Jenrette, posed for Playboy magazine, wrote a best-selling memoir and went to Harvard Business School.

The hotel was never built, but Ms. Jenrette moved to Rome to join her smitten prince. In April 2006, she underwent surgery for two brain tumors, a procedure that left her deaf in one ear. The couple married in a quiet ceremony in private chapel in Rome on May 27, 2009.

The princess, 60, has brought a dose of American entrepreneurialism to the role of Roman aristocrat. She and the prince have created a line of fragrances named after their villa's famous ceilings. Now she is working with two experts on a book about the Ludovisi gardens.

"When I die, at least I won't say I didn't try," she said. "I think I tried everything."

Source: nytimes.com
By: LINDA HERVIEUX

Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei’s corpse in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again and will soon be put on display, a Florence museum said Friday. Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Museum of the History of Science, said the body parts were removed by enthusiastic admirers in 1737, 95 years after the death of Galileo, left, when his corpse was being moved to Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. The relics recently turned up at auction, were purchased by a private collector and determined by cultural officials to be Galileo’s.

Source: nytimes.com
By: The Associated press

The artists were performing for an event at Spazio Arti e Mestieri, or SAM (Via Giano della Bella 20/1-20/2; www.spaziosam.it), which opened in April. While traditional artisans are struggling in the current economic climate, organizations like SAM are trying to bring the sector into the 21st century, tapping into a growing community of artists, designers and boutique owners who have flocked to the Oltrarno, a tightly packed neighborhood that has long personified the darker and grittier side of the city.

It was here, in the Santo Spirito church, for instance, that Michelangelo dissected and studied cadavers to learn human anatomy. A three-minute walk from that church, you now can browse the collections of the street-art-inspired fashions at Dangerous Work (Borgo San Frediano 17/r), which opened in 2004. Using designs from collaborators like Skki and Jay1, Tarek Hassanien, the shop’s Egyptian-born owner, oversees the production of his label’s series of apparel, which draws on the iconography of pop culture, like contemporary-cut hoodies (130 to 150 euros, or $199 to $233 at $1.53 to the euro).

“Oltrarno is the heart of the city, because here they invent,” Mr. Hassanien said.

As often is the case in Italy, the countercultural heart of the Oltrarno is on the street — especially Piazza Santo Spirito, which at night fills up with a young, hipsterish crowd. Drawing the denizens back indoors over the last couple of years is Libreria La Cite (Borgo San Frediano 20r; www.lacitelibreria.info), which has garnered rave reviews for its mix of affordable books, live music, coffee and even tango lessons.

Deeper into the district, the five-year-old Cantieri Goldonetta Firenze (Via Santa Maria 23-25; www.cango.fi.it), or Cango, offers space for performances and exhibitions, all under the direction of the choreographer Virgilio Sieni.

Mr. Sieni has recruited Oltrarno artisans to participate alongside trained dancers in his continuing “Academy on the Art of the Gesture” project — a multifaceted venture in which both professionals and people from other walks of life teach one another culturally specific gestures. Other Cango events use abandoned spaces, including decommissioned churches and workshops throughout the Oltrarno for performances and exhibitions.

“What I hope to realize here,” Mr. Sieni said, “is something tied to a total vision of the whole Oltrarno.”

By: Joel Weickgenant
Source: nytimes.com

ROME (AP) — Mike Bongiorno, a television host who popularized quiz shows for generations of Italians and became a symbol of national television, died on Monday at his home in Monte Carlo. He was 85.

The cause was a heart attack, the ANSA news agency and satellite television station Sky Italia said.

Mr. Bongiorno was among the first and most prominent personalities to move from state television to private television, contributing to the success of Mediaset S.p.A., the television company owned by Silvio Berlusconi, now the Italian prime minister, in the early 1980s.

Mr. Bongiorno had appeared on RAI state television on its first day of programming in the early 1950s and went on to host a series of successful quiz shows — many of them adaptations of American shows — for more than two decades. Millions of Italians watched as he asked sometimes impossible questions of his contestants.

Nicknamed the Quiz King, Mr. Bongiorno was one of Italy’s most enduring and beloved television personalities.

He was so popular that Umberto Eco wrote an essay called the “Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno,” using him as a symbol of popular culture.

Born in New York, Mr. Bongiorno moved to his mother’s hometown, Turin, Italy, as a boy. During World War II he took part in the Italian resistance and was briefly in a German concentration camp before being freed as part of a prisoner-of-war exchange, ANSA said.

Mr. Bongiorno appeared as himself in a handful of Italian movies, received an honorary degree in Milan and wrote an autobiography called “La Mia Versione” (“My Version”).

He recently left Mr. Berlusconi’s company and was working on a remake of his popular show “Rischiatutto” for Sky Italia.

Mr. Bongiorno is survived by his wife, Daniela Zuccoli, and three children.

Source: nytimes.com

Italians didn’t seem to care much.

The prize is the notorious, magnificent sixth-century B.C. red-figure krater by the Greek artist Euphronios, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art lately returned: the “hot pot,” as Thomas Hoving, the former Met director who bought it in 1972, mischievously took to calling it. A show of recovered spoils at the Quirinale in Rome last year became the pot’s homecoming party, after which it was rushed, like a freshly anointed Miss Italy, off to an exhibition in Mantua, appropriately enough about beauty.

Now it’s ensconced at the villa, its new permanent home, in a bulky glass case with odd little Christmas lights. Maybe overexposure explains why this didn’t strike Italians as particularly big news. The media mostly gave the event a pass. The gallery was empty the other afternoon.

A new book may help revive interest. “The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece,” just published by William Morrow, makes a first-class page turner out of the stolen krater’s travels from ancient Greece to Etruscan Italy to New York and then back here — and of the travails of another work also by the sublime Euphronios, a kylix, or chalice, which was looted from the same spot here in Cerveteri, a town northwest of Rome.

Vernon Silver, a 40-year-old American journalist and a doctoral student in archaeology at Oxford, wrote the book. “This is the whole illicit antiquities trade writ small,” he said a few days ago. “The two works started out in the hands of the same Greek artist, 2,500 years ago, ended up going through the same shady Italian dealer by different routes to America, one the public route, the other underground, and both end up back here in Italy.”

The tale is one neither Met officials nor Italian authorities will be pleased to find so conscientiously recounted. It turns out that balls were dropped and that plenty of other shenanigans transpired on both sides, even before the Met (obviously without trying too hard to check the facts) paid $1 million, an unprecedented sum at that time, for what was the finest example of painted pottery by the greatest known vase painter of ancient Greece. The museum’s story was that the krater, illustrating the Homeric tale of the death of Sarpedon, Zeus’ son, belonged to a Lebanese collector. But rumors instantly started circulating that the pot had been looted. Italian police began hunting for evidence in Cerveteri, the former Etruscan city of Caere, known for its ancient tombs. (Etruscans collected Euphronios the way that Gilded Age Americans collected Rembrandt.) Not coincidentally, modern-day Cerveteri is famous for its tomb robbers.

Mr. Silver returned one sweltering day last month to the patch of countryside on the edge of town where, late in 1971, a lookout watched while five tombaroli, as tomb robbers are called here, stuck poles into the wet earth until they struck something underground. They tunneled some 15 feet down and came upon a complex of ancient burial chambers. They knew they had hit pay dirt when they unearthed painted pottery, broken but (all things considered) mostly in tip-top condition.

The man who bought the loot from them later passed it along to a restorer in Switzerland, who repaired the pots before they were sent on to a dealer, who in turn approached the Met. It wasn’t until reading in the newspapers, months later, how much the museum had actually paid for the Euphronios krater that the robbers realized that they had themselves been bamboozled.

The site today is thick with prickly brush, yellow broom and purple malva, a picturesque ruin, scented by wild mint and fennel. It isn’t hard to figure out why the robbers looked here. Local superstition had it that the place was haunted by a demon, so tombaroli steered clear for eons. Looting-wise, it was virgin territory.

“This is also a place where you find things just lying around in plain sight,” Mr. Silver said. “So it was obvious that something might turn up.” At that moment, resting in the dirt near Mr. Silver’s foot, was a shard of ancient pottery with traces of paint still on it. A second piece lay beside it.

The demon ended up being an ancient sculpture of a gnarly monster, buried along with other stone sculptures. To cover their tracks, the looters filled in the tunnels, after which hasty Italian investigators bulldozed the grounds in a curious rush to uncover the ransacked tombs. It became impossible after that to reconstruct how the works had lain when the tombaroli found them.

“Had someone properly excavated the site,” Mr. Silver said, “we could have learned so much more about the Etruscans.”

But the looters did bring to light the krater, which millions of people then saw at the Met, where for decades it was the centerpiece of the ancient-vase collection. Much of what Italian authorities fished out of the ground afterward, lesser finds, ended up in Cerveteri’s small archaeology museum, which even now keeps strangely mute about the looting.

The silence is even more striking at the Villa Giulia, where not a word about Cerveteri accompanies the newly installed krater. Museum authorities insist that the arrangement is temporary. They say the work will move to a display of artifacts from Cerveteri that they’re preparing in the villa.

Meanwhile, the krater is divorced from the spot where the looters discovered it, not to mention from its Greek origin. A Greek pot sold to an Etruscan buyer and stolen from an Italian site and ending up in New York, it has become a Greek pot in a Roman museum dedicated to Etruscan art, displayed now alongside other artifacts recovered from American museums with labels identifying not the archaeological legacy of these objects but the institutions that gave them back. What matters to the Italians, it would seem, is not simply straightening out the archaeological record. It’s also providing cautionary tales for prospective collectors in the illegal antiquities trade via trophies like the krater.

As for the kylix that Mr. Silver also writes about, it shattered a few years ago when dropped by a Swiss policeman after a raid on the Geneva warehouse belonging to Giacomo Medici, the Roman middleman who bought the hot pots from the looters and passed them along to Robert Hecht, the American dealer who sold the krater to the Met. Today the kylix remains in pieces behind locked doors in a fake Etruscan temple on the grounds of the Villa Giulia. Occasionally, a visitor will try to peer through the keyhole, oblivious to what’s inside.

If any doubts remain about whether the Euphronioses were really looted, by the way, Francesco Bartocci is still around. So far as he knows, he’s the last survivor among the tombaroli. He acted as the lookout. A farmer by trade, now 70, he lives in a modest house in Cerveteri. He was standing on his patio in sandals, T-shirt and baggy trousers when his wife emerged from the cellar, lugging a pitcher of homemade olive oil and a plastic bag full of broken pieces of ancient pottery that she explained had turned up when the patio had recently been repaired.

“They’re everywhere,” she said about the potsherds, before asking if Mr. Silver might wish to take the bag off her hands. (No thanks, he said.)

“They stole a whole lot of money from me,” Mr. Bartocci declared when asked about Mr. Medici (not a relative of the aristocrats, if you were wondering) and Mr. Hecht. “But what was I supposed to do? I was a thief like they were.”

He shrugged. The job was his only stint as a looter, he wanted to make clear: “I’m a farmer, not a tombarolo, but I had a truck, a three-wheeler, which they needed because there was so much stuff to cart away.”

In this region where looting has long been an open profession, and where there’s even a store selling reproductions of ancient pots cheekily called the Metropolitan Museo, Mr. Bartocci is hardly ashamed of what he did.

“I’m proud,” he said. “I’m sorry the vase went to America and that I didn’t make more money.” He laughed. “But I’m honored to be associated with something so great.”

And now he’s glad to hear the Euphronios is back in Italy.