Casina del Cardinal Bessarione

The present form is fifteenth-century, over medieval fabric that itself encloses Roman structures. Below the basement are funerary structures of the first century BC and a building of at least three phases, from the early imperial period to the first half of the second century AD, from which survive black-and-white mosaic paving and an opus mixtum wall in the ground-floor south-west masonry. The medieval phase relates to a hospital run in the early fourteenth century by the fratres cruciferi, later a Benedictine nunnery. The extension towards the street with the first-floor loggia, and the conversion into the summer residence of the cardinal titular of Tusculum, date to the second half of the fifteenth century. From this comes the hypothesis, which the Sovrintendenza Capitolina says recent documentary finds support, that Cardinal Giovanni Bessarione, titular of Tusculum from 1449 to 1468, lived here. Clement VIII granted it in 1600 to the Collegio Clementino, which he had founded in 1594; after the college was suppressed in 1870 it passed to the Convitto Nazionale, was reduced to an inn between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, was ceded by the State to the Comune di Roma in 1926, and was restored and inaugurated in 1933. It is now one of the Comune's representative venues.