Why the Villa Medici

If the Villa Medici exists, it is first of all out of ambition. In 1576 Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici — the future Grand Duke of Tuscany — bought this unfinished house on the Pincio to assert his family’s power in the heart of Rome. He entrusted the architect Bartolomeo Ammannati with a garden façade of extraordinary richness, studded with antique reliefs, and installed his collection of marbles there. The villa became a “house of delights”, at once palace, museum and garden, designed to dazzle ambassadors and princes. It is this setting that, three centuries later, the French residents would discover.

The villa façade crowned by its tower, above the box squares