When Cavaliere Lorenzo de Domo Alberini, a young man with a surreal sense of humour and a talent for living with gusto, flung open the doors to his revamped villa in southern Umbria, it caused a furore. Although the jeunesse dorée flocked to his all-night parties, where dancing and gambling were followed by torch-lit chases up and down the stairs and into the darkest recesses of the villa, there were waves of disapproval among more conservative circles as far as the papal court in Rome.
Here was the scion of two rich and noble dynasties, the De Domos, from Umbria, and the Roman Alberinis, recklessly squandering the wealth his forebears had amassed through centuries of wars, nep- otism and advantageous marriages. How? By building himself a monumental villa not to cement the family status and ensure its continuation - Lorenzo, a confirmed bachelor, would remain childless - but for his own pleasure. One hundred rooms hidden behind a deceptively sober whitewashed façade. Rooms that a team of accomplished trompe-l‘oeil artists and decorators, directed by the cavaliere him- self, populated with busy-looking people, dogs, other animals and everyday objects - all of them painted with such natural realism that even the most jaded of visitors can't resist being drawn into this playful realm where nothing is quite as it seems.
In the late 18th century, such light-hearted expressions were rare in central Italy, afflicted as it was by political and economic instability, religious backlashes and smallpox outbreaks. Which is why Villa de Domo Alberini stands out like a beacon of unbridled creativity and irreverent humour. And yet, aside from family friends and a select group of art historians, very few people know of its existence. Fewer still have ever laid eyes on it. Accessed via an impossibly long and winding dirt road with plenty of forks and no signposts, it is as elusive as a chimaera. Photographer Simon Watson and I get stranded in a forest trying to reach it. ‘Keeping my villa off the maps,’ says Lorenzo, the owner and cavaliere’s eponymous descendant, when he comes to rescue us, ‘is the best way of protecting its dreamlike mystery.’
That dream becomes a reality the moment one steps through the portal leading into a faux-marble hall. The words Tutto è vanità (All is vanity, from Ecclesiastes) painted on a red banner flapping on the ceiling sets the bittersweet tone of what is to come. If life is so fleeting, the cava-laire argued, why not enjoy the moment? A teenager with a cheeky smile looks straight at us from a wall by the base of the grand staircase. Judging by his attire a white silk livery with a turquoise sash tied around his waist – and the silver tray he is holding, he is a servant. He points the way up the staircase, past another grim reminder that ‘Nothing is forever’ and on to the first-floor landing, where we are greeted by stern-looking Swiss Guards, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the family's ties to the Church: two popes and dozens of cardinals, as our host explains.
Like most well-educated Italians of his generation, Cavaliere Lorenzo de Domo Alberini read the classics, dabbled in philosophy, wrote poetry and was fascinated by natural sciences. The wall decorations he commissioned are testament to all these interests. In the library, a tiny room lined with trompe-l‘oeil books, a pair of round turtle-shell eyeglasses and a scribbled note are left ‘casually’ on a shelf a reminder to friends and party-goers of their host's erudition. Further along the hall, in the so-called forest chamber, birds in mid-flight or perched on branches are depicted in exquisite detail. ‘They are local species,’ our real-life Lorenzo explains. ‘He was a keen ornithologist.’ Another reminder of the cavaliere's philosophical and Classical pursuits can be found in one of the villa's many bedrooms, where the likes of Epicurus, Plato and Pythago- ras peer out of monochrome trompe-l‘oeil medallions on the ceiling. The most fascinating room of all is the ‘pharmacy’, its trompe-l‘oeil shelves and glass-fronted cabinets stacked with all sorts of apothecary jars and boxes, their supposed exotic contents labelled in Latin.
For years the salone delle colonne, a theatrical room with vaulted ceilings sustained by columns, now a formal dining room, was where the cavaliere and his friends gambled away their fortunes. The marvellous trompe-l‘oeil murals of crumbling ruins subliminally point in one direction: disaster. Not even Goddess Fortuna, looking down from her golden chariot on the ceiling, could save the cavaliere. With self-deprecating humour, he promptly informed the villa's visitors of the dire situation he was facing. ‘Hadn't realised so many rooms had been built’, reads one inscription in the main hallway. ‘Spent too much, tried too hard’, reads another, followed by ‘Very little food left’, ‘Better pray’ and ‘Need to save up now’. His only surviving portrait, humbly painted on the back of a bedroom door, speaks more than any words: wearing scruffy clothes and a lop-sided hat, he appears bleary-eyed, blotchy- skinned and unshaven. He looks hungover and very sorry for himself.
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At the age of 46 and after ten good years of gambling and partying, Cavaliere Lorenzo finally agreed to marry. Colomba Guadagnoli, a local heiress whose face had been ravaged by smallpox, was clever, knew how to keep accounts and was ready to pour a hefty dowry into the depleted De Domo Alberini coffers. Not an easy move for our free-spirited, fun-loving cavaliere. ‘What bitterness you will experience,’ wrote one well-meaning friend, ‘what a crucifixion, what a life!’ After making his future wife wait three years, in 1793 he capitulated. But shortly after the union, which produced no children, the groom was back to his old tricks. These included a series of murals, realised in 1805, depicting Franciscan monks running amok on the ground floor and cloistered nuns in the attic. These can be seen as a private act of resistance against the dissolution of monasteries and nunneries, in Umbria and elsewhere, or as another reason to smile at life's absurdities.
Whatever, we have Colomba to thank for these interiors, and the surrounding land, still being in one piece. After the cavaliere died, leaving a mountain of debts (by which point, the two of them had been living apart for years), she refused to sell up and instead worked hard to make ends meet and salvage his legacy before passing it on to a long line of indirect descendants. All of them proved to be worthy of the task, and if Lorenzo were to walk into his villa today, and look out across his vast estate, he would find almost nothing had changed since it was built. Now it’s his namesake’s turn to take care of this masterpiece and the philosophy that lies behind it: follow your inclinations, never lose your sense of wonder and have fun. Life is too ephemeral not to.
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