Throughout the early modern period, the villas of Frascati played a central role in Roman social politics. In the mid-sixteenth century, humanists and churchmen built villas on ancient ruins and pursued the ancient ideal of learned leisure, hoping to acquire an aura of virtue and sophistication associated with eminent Romans who had sojourned at Frascati in antiquity. New families penetrated Roman society and began to climb from the ranks of the ecclesiastical nobility into the secular aristocracy. In this study, Tracy Ehrlich analyses the Villa Mondragone, built by Pope Paul V Borghese in an effort to demonstrate how architecture, landscape and rituals of villeggiatura (villa life) were used to forge a new identity as a Roman noble house. She also explores the relationship between landscape and identity and, in so doing, reevaluates the conventional privileging of the city over the countryside.
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