What you see is only a small part of a property that held three vineyards, gathered by Julius III, a learned humanist and a keen lover of the arts, to make himself a residence outside the gates. The building is by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, between 1551 and 1553; the nymphaeum and the garden works are by Bartolomeo Ammannati; Michelangelo too supplied a design for the casino, and Giorgio Vasari, who claims that he was the first to draw and invent the whole of the Vigna Julia, probably oversaw the decorative scheme as a whole. Dealings between the pope and the team of artists went through his master of the chamber. Once Julius III was dead, his successor Paul IV confiscated all the property that pope had put together: the villa was divided up, and ended in the hands of the nephews of the pope who came next.
What to see
A suburban villa was a threshold between two worlds: on one side the town entrance on the via Flaminia, on the other the garden. The street front is severe and straight, the back curves into a semicircle, and there are three gardens, on different levels. The heart of it lies lower down: the nymphaeum, where people ate sheltered from the sun and the feasting lasted all day, set out on three tiers of loggias with statues and balustrades around the fountain of river gods and caryatids designed by Vasari and Ammannati. To make it work the villa was given an underground branch of the Acqua Vergine all to itself, the same aqueduct that feeds the Trevi fountain; later the neighbourhood profited too, thanks to two drinking fountains placed at the top of the road.
Visiting
In 1769 Clement XIV had the building restored and handed it to the army: quarters, storehouses, even a lazaretto. The Veterinary School moved in as well, and for its convenience a ramped way down to the lower fountain of the nymphaeum was opened, where the horses were watered. With the taking of Rome the building passed to the Italian state and began to gather the material coming out of the digs between the Cimini hills and the Tiber; in 1889 the museum was founded, charged with bringing together in one place the pre-Roman antiquities of Lazio, southern Etruria and Umbria, Etruscan and Faliscan. In the nineteen-thirties two outer wings were added, and in the courtyard they created stands the reproduction of an Etruscan temple: it is not an ancient one.
Our editors' tip
The most famous piece is the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, a terracotta funerary monument with a couple almost life-size, reclining in the pose of a banquet. But look as well at the Pyrgi tablets, a text in Etruscan and in Phoenician; the Apollo of Veii; the Ficoroni cista, a bronze casket for jewels; the Chigi olpe; and the high relief from the pediment of temple A at Pyrgi with the Seven against Thebes, where Tydeus is eating the brain of Melanippus. And keep in mind how people got here: the pope's guests took a boat at the gates of the Vatican, went up the Tiber to the villa's own reserved landing and spent the day in the nymphaeum. Little more than two centuries later, down into that same nymphaeum went the horses.