Villa Caprile is a Baroque building with historic gardens on the San Bartolo hill, in a panoramic position above the city of Pesaro; today it houses the «Antonio Cecchi» upper secondary school, with an agricultural programme.
What to see
The heart of the complex is the Italian garden on several levels, with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century water games among the best preserved and still working of their kind, designed to surprise the visitor with automata and sudden jets, also in the «grottoes» under the main staircase; they are operated by a guide-attendant and follow a narrative, playful route. The upper level has flower beds and a central octagonal basin, the middle level was the orchard, with a fountain with two tritons; below, a double semicircular ramp leads to a basin with the statue of Atlas. In a clearing is the small green theatre, with tiers of cypress and box trimmed in topiary, inaugurated in 1792 by Francesco Mosca Barzi for the private performances of the Arcadia of Pesaro. The main body of the villa, Baroque, has three floors and a central belvedere added in the second half of the eighteenth century; on the piano nobile the rooms are decorated with scenes from classical myth, painted by Giulio Cesare Begni and renewed between 1763 and 1797 by Ubaldo Geminiani, and in the great hall the ceiling bears the motto «Sine Cerere et Bacco, friget Venere». At the back are a gallery of mirrors with stuccoes by Antonio Trentanove and a Neoclassical oratory dedicated to Saint Francis, designed in 1763.
The villa was born as a «villa di delizia»: in 1640 the marquis Giovanni Mosca, of a family of wealthy silk merchants from Bergamo settled in Pesaro since 1550, began building a summer residence on the hillock called «Caprile». Over time it was a point of reference for the local aristocracy and a cultural stop of European importance, with guests such as Stendhal, Giacomo Casanova, Caroline of Brunswick and Napoleon Bonaparte. Its upkeep had however become too costly and in 1876 the Mosca sold the complex, which was turned into an agricultural school; in 1924 ownership and management passed to the Province of Pesaro. During the Second World War the Germans used it as a stronghold of the eastern sector of the Gothic Line and the villa was damaged; in 2022 one of the five bunkers it had been given was restored. Near the gardens a memorial stone recalls the Allied fallen and shows the propeller blade of a B-26 Marauder bomber that crashed on the grounds.
Visiting
The villa is on the San Bartolo hill, above Pesaro. The sources consulted give neither hours nor conditions of visit: these should be checked, especially for the water games, which according to the sources are run by an operator who accompanies visitors.
Our editors' tip
Today's main entrance is the side one, but the monumental entrance, in line with the villa, can still be seen even though it is closed to traffic: on the via Flaminia two massive polygonal turrets with stuccoes by Antonio Trentanove mark the gate from which the avenue of twenty-four statues once climbed.
