Villa Paolina Bonaparte

Villa Paolina, also called Villa Bonaparte, is the seat of the Embassy of France to the Holy See, with its entrance on via Piave. It is a diplomatic mission standing on Italian soil in the rione Sallustiano: it is not Vatican territory, it is not French territory, and it is not one of the Lateran Treaty's extraterritorial properties. Roma Capitale's tourism portal states the embassy identity itself.

The same portal gives the history. What stands here is what survives of a villa that ran inside the Aurelian Walls between Porta Pia and Porta Salaria, with the casino in the middle of the park. It was built in 1750 for Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, Secretary of State to Benedict XIV, who turned orchards into gardens with exotic planting and raised the villino at their centre. Roma Capitale's tourism portal states that Paolina Borghese, Napoleon's sister, bought the villa in 1816 and lived there until 1824; the same page's historical note says she reached Rome in 1815 and bought Villa Valenti then. On her death in 1825 it passed to her nephews and their descendants.

They held it until 1906, when it was sold to the Prussian government, which installed its legation to the Holy See in 1908 and the German embassy from 1920 to 1944. Reich property was taken by the Allies in 1945; France acquired the villa, and on 15 December 1950 Wladimir d'Ormesson moved the French embassy to the Holy See into Villa Bonaparte. That date is Roma Capitale's; Italian Wikipedia dates the French embassy's arrival to 1951, and the discrepancy is left standing rather than resolved.

Roma Capitale's tourism portal states that it was inside Villa Paolina that the bersaglieri found themselves when they got through the Aurelian Walls at the breach of Porta Pia in 1870. The same page offers a detail you can check on foot: the orange trees planted along the pavement of via XX Settembre opposite the Ministry of the Treasury are a memento of the villa's orangery.

The villa is not visitable and no source fetched for this guide gives any public opening. The garden inside the compound is not a public park and is not written here as one. One caution for anyone searching: it.ambafrance.org is the French embassy to Italy, a different mission, and is not this building's website.