![]() ![]() ![]() In the garden, there is a statue of Pan by Michelangelo. Mellon Professor-in-Charge at the American Academy in Rome, told me. “From my perspective, the whole history of the West is in that building,” T. Since she moved to Rome, the Principessa has devoted herself to the restoration of the Villa Aurora, which was erected in 1570 by Francesco del Nero, on the site of the ancient Gardens of Sallust. “This is my husband’s coat of arms-our coat of arms now,” the Principessa said to her guests early in the tour, as they admired a large Guercino fresco on the first floor. She’s candid like a child but shrewd like a fox!” When they first met, he explained, “I said, in the clumsiest way one can even imagine, ‘Well, you are not ugly.’ She’s beautiful, of course, but she’s as beautiful inside. A bald man of seventy, with light-green eyes, he has grown a bit heavy around the middle, but he was legendarily handsome in his youth. “It was probably written in the stars,” Prince Nicolò told me. “I said, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sakes! Everybody in New York calls themselves count or prince or whatever-they’re not.’ ” She was ultimately persuaded to go to Rome, where she fell in love and became a princess. “They called me and said, ‘We have this prince who would like to develop a hotel on his property,’ ” she recalled. She met her current husband, Nicolò Boncompagni Ludovisi, in 2003, when a friend of his asked her to serve as his broker. Her biggest deal was the sale of the General Motors Building to Donald Trump, in 1998. She lived in Los Angeles next, and pursued an acting career-she appeared on an episode of “Fantasy Island” as a character called Nurse Heavenly, and in a film entitled “Zombie Island Massacre”-and subsequently moved to New York City, where she worked as an on-camera reporter for “A Current Affair,” and then as a real-estate broker. She spent five years in Washington, D.C., married to Representative John Jenrette, a South Carolina Democrat shortly before their divorce, in 1981, she appeared in Playboy, in photographs that featured a feather boa and a brandy snifter. ![]() She was born Rita Carpenter, in San Antonio, and grew up in Austin. The Principessa speaks English with a slight Texas twang. “You interact with it and you decide what you want to see.” “But it’s like Marshall McLuhan-hot media,” she continued. “Yes, I think so.” The Principessa, a very trim, pretty woman with platinum-blond hair and the sharp, perfectly symmetrical features of a Madame Alexander doll, is sixty-one, but she looks about forty-five, and she was wearing a short, tight black dress with white polka dots and shiny leather pumps. “He’s opening up the old Ptolemaic sphere,” the German man said, gazing at Jupiter. “Look at his hand-he’s pushing away the sun.” “It’s hard to imagine that Caravaggio didn’t know Galileo,” she said. The painting, a luminous depiction of the three sons of Chronos looking down from the clouds at the milky universe as Jupiter repositions the sun and the earth with his outstretched hand, is on the second floor of the Villa Aurora, a forty-thousand-square-foot palazzo in which the Principessa has resided for the past eight years. One bright September morning in Rome, when it still felt like summer, Her Serene Highness the Principessa Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi stood with half a dozen Japanese tourists and a German couple under “Jupiter, Pluto, and Neptune,” the only painting Caravaggio is known to have executed on a ceiling. The Principessa Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi. ![]()
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