Villa Strohl-Fern

It is named for the Alsatian patron and artist Alfred Wilhelm Strohl, born at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines in 1847 and died in Rome in 1927, who took refuge in Paris during the war of 1870, travelled Europe and settled in Rome in 1879, buying eight hectares that year and turning them into a park of studios for artists of any school or nationality; the name joins his surname to the German word fern. Antonello Trombadori, who went there from 1919 with his father the painter Francesco Trombadori, wrote that the property had never been part of Villa Borghese but was a wooded and meadowed holding bordering it, running from the left propylaeum to the Valle Giulia steps, and that only after the Second World War was the park temporarily annexed to the public Villa Borghese while keeping its own history and identity. He described its core as a forbidden city behind a high fence, a fabulous garden of rare species with false-stalactite fountains, concrete tanks, cedars, bamboo and holm oaks. Francesco Trombadori had his studio there and died there in 1961.