Villa Celimontana

The Sovrintendenza Capitolina records that the land around Santa Maria in Domnica was bought in the mid 1500s by Giacomo Mattei and given in dowry to his daughter Claudia, wife and cousin of Ciriaco Mattei, who turned the vineyard into a garden of statues and fountains. Work probably began in 1572, the casino from after 1577 and probably finished by 1581, traditionally begun by Jacopo Del Duca, a pupil of Michelangelo. The hanging garden and the teatro were laid out as an antique circus with a tiered hemicycle, with the Egyptian obelisk as its spina. The villa stayed with the Mattei until the male line died out in the early nineteenth century. The Sovrintendenza Capitolina records that in 1926 the Palazzina Mattei passed to the Regia Società Geografica Italiana and the park was designated public green space, opened to the public in 1928. Roma Capitale adds that the villa covers a Flavian and Trajanic site with enclosure walls partly visible, that the castra of the fifth cohort of the Vigiles stood here, and that excavations of the late 1800s brought up the Basilica Hilariana.