Experience Roman life like Romans do. Discover Villa Torlonia and the other rioni.
Uncover the city’s living history. Rione maps Rome’s ancient quarters dynamically — unlocking subterranean layers, hidden stories and local secrets right where you stand.
Dynamic, interactive boundaries of all of Rome’s historical rioni, colour-coded and tappable.
Every monument with photos, history and the stories beneath the stones.
The main palace of the Villa Torlonia estate, the Casino Nobile was transformed in the early 19th century by the architect Giuseppe Valadier into a sumptuous Neoclassical residence for the immensely rich Torlonia banking family, complete with a temple-like portico and lavishly frescoed and stuccoed rooms.
Beneath Villa Torlonia, where Mussolini lived through most of his rule, lies a series of air-raid shelters dug for the dictator and his family as the Second World War closed in. The earliest were cramped cellars reinforced with concrete; the last and deepest, begun in 1942, was a proper bunker buried metres underground, with gas-proof doors and air-filtration systems, left unfinished when the regime fell.
This whimsical building began life around 1840 as the "Capanna Svizzera" — a Swiss-style cabin built as a rustic retreat in the Torlonia grounds. From the 1910s the architect Giovanni Battista Gennari transformed it into one of the most enchanting structures in Rome: the "Casina delle Civette", the Little House of the Owls.