Villa Ada Savoia

On 25 July 1943, after the Grandi motion, the king summoned Mussolini to Villa Ada, where he was arrested and driven away in an ambulance. The estate was partly unified by Prince Luigi Pallavicini at the end of the 1780s, who had it laid out by the French architect Auguste Chevalle de Saint-Hubert with Francesco Bettini; on the Presidenza del Censo plan of 1839 much of the former Pallavicini estate appears as Potenziani property, and in 1872 it was sold to Vittorio Emanuele II, who enlarged it by buying neighbouring vineyards. In 1878 the villa was sold to a count of Swiss origin whose name the Sovrintendenza Capitolina gives as Tellfner; it.wikipedia gives the name as Giuseppe Telfener and says the estate took the name Ada from his wife. Vittorio Emanuele III repurchased it in 1904 and it was a royal residence until 1946; the part toward via Salaria was acquired by the state demanio in 1957. The Sovrintendenza names the Casale detto La Finanziera, now the seat of WWF; the Fienile, used as a riding centre; the Casale delle Cavalle Madri, named for its Savoy-era use as a shelter for brood mares from the Quirinale stables; Villa Polissena; the Scuderie reali; the Villa Reale; the Casino Pallavicini; the Tempio di Flora; and le Tribune along the boundary wall on via Salaria. The Tempio di Flora is an eighteenth-century coffee-house by the Casino Pallavicini, its neoclassical pronaos and facade concealing an apsed rear that repeats the colonnade and looks down on a small amphitheatre-shaped hollow with a late nineteenth-century cast iron fountain at its centre.