Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.
It is the second time that I am writing about The Two Popes movie, and about popes, cardinals, and the Catholic Church. Last time, I wrote about the Umbrian town of Assisi. This time, it’s about Caprarola and the Farnese family.
In this feature, I want to write about three things.
Rome and its surroundings in general, particularly from a historical point of view, detailing the Papal States and their medieval/Renaissance history. This part might offend some people, but it's an honest truth, and it helps explain why this region looks the way it does today.
The House of Farnese as an exemplary Italian noble family. Not the most popular (those would probably be the Medicis and Borgias), but very well connected and a good example for point 1.
Caprarola as a town, the emblem for both points, with its Via Dritta promenade leading to the pentagonal Villa Farnese, one of the best-preserved High Renaissance villas in the region.
I won’t talk about these one by one as it is one single topic, so allow me to riff here and there. Enjoy the ride.
Lazio is Rome’s backyard
Today, Rome is Italy's capital. It is also home to Vatican City. I am not 100% sure that the world has an older, more significant, and more loaded capital city in human history that is still with us, with almost all of its glory. So, I’m not even trying to talk about Rome here.
Let’s just focus on the fact that Rome was the capital of the Roman Catholic Church, and it still has the Vatican. But the Vatican itself is a new construct, barely a hundred years old. Before that, there were the Papal States. Actual administrative regions and states, managed by the Pope and the Church. Land. And its people. With an army, a flag, and anything a nation sports. The size was flexible due to wars, conquests, and the actual power of the Church, but Lazio, Lazio was always part of the Church.
Unlike other nations at that time, where you had kings and nobles who ruled over the land and its people, the Church was slightly different. The king was the Pope (sidenote: the Pope is still one of the last absolute monarchs of our time, King of Vatican City). There were noblemen who were also often, guess what, cardinals. Via politics, and of course, God’s will, some became Popes. Others stayed cardinals. As cardinals, they gained more power, land, and resources.
Also, unlike other nations at that time, the Church of Saint Peter’s was already older than any other nation. It still is today. And with time, as anyone who invested their money in ETFs in the stock market or waited long enough to sell their real estate would know, with time, you get money. The more continuous, uninterrupted your rule is, regardless of how big your country is, the more money you gain. By the 16th century, when Cardinal Alessandro Farnese became Pope (Paul III), the Catholic Church was already more than 1,000 years old. The famous Roderic, or Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI, kinda emptied the financials, but the Church still had insane wealth when the Farnese family finally got their moment and sat on the throne of Saint Peter’s. By the way, Rodrigo Borgia’s mistress? Giulia Farnese, the up-and-coming Farnese family’s little daughter. By the way, watch the Borgias show, kinda old series, full of politics, history, and sex, obviously, kinda like historically accurate Game of Thrones. Rodrigo is played by Jeremy Irons, the little Farnese girl is also in it.
So, people in Lazio might not want to hear this, but the Papal States were very, shall we say, unequal in terms of wealth. While Tuscany, Lombardy, and Piedmont enjoyed a merchant middle class, Lazio had basically two types of people: God’s shepherds and, well… the flock. In other words: the Church was extremely rich, the people underneath it lived very simply.
This is why Rome as a city is filled with palazzos next to churches. The Church itself or its cardinals owned all the famous buildings. In the countryside, if you had a palazzo or a slightly better-built building, it almost always turned out to belong to someone from the Church, most likely a bishop or a cardinal. That's why all the other buildings and towns in Lazio looked like simple peasant dwellings: poor farmers living in poverty. Nothing like the proud farmlands of Tuscan peasants.
Let’s say you hop in your car and drive down from Florence to Rome. It is barely a 3-hour drive. You drive through the Val d’Orcia and the Chianti region, or go through Volterra to Siena. Then comes Maremma with its plains and cowboys. What you will see is beautiful landscape, big, well-kept villas, palazzos, estates, farms. If there is an aesthetic chart for a landscape, where 1 is, let’s say, the outskirts of Naples (sorry!), and 10 is Firenze, you are around 9 here. Everything is in order, pleasing to the eye. Then you arrive in Tuscia, the Northern part of Lazio. By the time you end up in Rome, it feels like you’ve stepped back on your chart at least 4 points, if not 5, and barely drove for an hour. It’s a huge drop. It’s because of this inequality between the Church and its flock, the people of Lazio, and the group of bishops and cardinals.
It’s not just because the Church didn’t give a flying F about their people. It’s mostly because they didn’t know better. They were people of faith, religion, and the Church's internal politics. And while kings were often either challenged or overthrown by their people if they became careless, no one really dared to challenge the Pope and the Church. Not just their people, not even other kings. So the people of the Papal States became, really, simply food providers and lived off the land for the Church. Yeah, before you wonder, no one went to war for the Church, since it’s kinda hard to conscript people whom you care zero about, so the Church’s army was almost always a mercenary army.
This same concept is why Rome, as a city, functions astonishingly badly, with surprisingly horrible infrastructure and almost no services for the people who live there. Italians often say mafia capitale, which kinda sums up the situation. I lived in Rome, and as beautiful and grandiose as the city is, it is unbelievable how bad the services are. The so-called metro, the public transport, the city streets, the main hospitals, the roads, any infrastructure really, is unspeakable. Of course, real estate is booming, and people live well because half the world is lining up to see the Trevi and the Colosseum, but if you are not a tourist, living in Rome, shall we say, has its challenges.
Caprarola and the Villa Farnese
So, you now have a kinda good idea of how the Church functioned in this era. Now, enter the mid-16th century. Remember Giulia Farnese from the turn of the century there? Mistress of Rodrigo Borgia, the Pope? Just a little girl of the rising small noble family of Farnese? The family did some great moves and marriages, Giulia ended up with a member of the Orsini family (still an active noble family in Italy), and the Farnese family produced a cardinal. How? Well, Alessandro, who started building the Villa Farnese, was Giulia’s brother. I guess sleeping with the Pope paid out in a red hat. Which means, guess what, money. And with money, there come palaces. This is Villa Farnese, in Caprarola. Which, by the way, last gossip story here, sorry, can’t resist, so the villa was finished by the grandson of Alessandro (Pope Paul III), whom the Pope, Alessandro himself, made into a cardinal at the age of fourteen (!!!!!). Peak nepotism, so good. Welcome to the Catholic Church.
It is a pentagonal villa, built over almost 30 years. It was stopped when the family produced a Pope, but they resumed after. The town is in the center of Italy’s hazelnut-producing area. In the Farnese era, it was mostly farmland and chestnuts, hazelnuts came in the 1970s (now mostly ending up in Nutella by Ferrero). Between towns, it’s endless hazelnut groves. The villa is one of the best sights in the region for several reasons.
One reason is that it is very rare to see a noble villa in the middle of a town. If you see one, it’s usually a palazzo on a big square. Here, it seems that the town is built around the villa, almost as an afterthought. Which is kinda true. There is the via Dritta, the main promenade, or the procession to the villa. It runs through the middle of town, along the main street, and leads straight up to the villa. Everything, the entire town, is built around it, almost like a set for the villa, which sits on the top of the town with its insanely huge and beautiful garden behind it.
It is not a coincidence. The family, or well, their architect, literally demolished the center of the town with all the buildings, built a huge highway leading up to the villa, and rebuilt the surrounding buildings. The people living there were kind of an afterthought, I guess. This kinda sums up the Church's and its Cardinals' approach to their flock, shall we say, and it is a symbol of everything I’ve just described around this time. At least, the villa is amazing. The town, like it or not, was planned as an urban-planning example, as famous as Pienza (the ideal Tuscan village, which was entirely constructed) and Palmanova with its famous star-like shape. Caprarola, with the main promenade inside a town leading to a villa on the hill, is a sight worth its own.
And it truly is. Rivals the Vatican. So much so that when the Farnesi family became kinda unpopular with the Cardinals in Rome because of their newly gained immense wealth, they retired here for some time. Anyone who stepped into the town of Caprarola knew the family had gained wealth within 2-3 generations, which is considered a very short time in Rome. Remember how much Rome hated the Borgias, who gained so much influence within a few generations, then quickly dissolved as a family and retreated back to current-day Spain. The Farnese family got the same treatment: they dissolved about 200 years later without an heir and were absorbed into the Bourbon family through marriages.
It is so similar to most Vatican palaces, most of them are closed to the public, by the way, that the palace actually served as a filming location for the Two Popes movie. It served as a stand-in for the Vatican, the Papal Palace, and the Pope’s summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, near Rome. Any internal scene you saw in the movie meant to be the Vatican was shot here.
Our day in Caprarola
For me, it was also a life-changing experience, as I detailed in my piece about Ronciglione. If Ronciglione showed me how enjoyable a small, sleepy, hidden Italian town can be, Caprarola and the Villa Farnese showed me how amazing a sight can be when it is not overrun by tourism. Or in other words: how much don’t we know about “secondary” landmarks? Yes, visit the Vatican. It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and Saint Peter’s Basilica makes everyone a devout Christian forever, just because of its sheer power and volume. But then, visit these smaller sites that tell a story about what was going on in the background.
We went there on a Saturday in July, straight from Ronciglione, since it is about a 15-minute drive. We expected hordes. I don’t remember exactly, but I’m sure there were no more than 10 people there, including us two. Literally no one was there. The garden, which is huge and worth a trip alone, was completely empty and only for us. The photos, as you can see, we didn’t wait minutes to get them without people. There were simply just no people.
Most people, as do I, when we go to a museum (a villa like this, internally, is a museum), go room to room. We might stop for a few minutes, but it’s more like a religious walk-around, a pilgrimage. We might listen to a guide or follow a group, but it is rare that we stop for a long time in a room. Maybe the main attraction. But in a random room, no.
We’ve spent almost the entire day in this villa. You know why? We sat down in one of the windows, looked out to the town, through the promenade that was built for the villa, talked about random stuff, and let the day pass. In the cafeteria, we’ve got a coffee to go, which a) is a sacrilege in Italy b) since no one really asked for this, no one really knew how to make it, so finding a paper cup was that year’s most demanding challenge for the staff. They made it, so yaaay, and we went on our walk to the gardens with the giant coffee cup in our hands and two bottles of cold water. I mean, you can’t be more touristy than that. But again, who cares? We’ve spent the entire afternoon in the garden. There was no one there.
And at the end of the day, this is just a pentagonal-shaped, very old villa in a sleepy town that has pretty much nothing to offer except this villa for visitors. And it was one of the best day trips we did.
Lastly, if you are done with the day trip in Caprarola, I suggest heading down to Lake Vico. It’s a small volcanic lake underneath the city of Caprarola. Literally a 10-minute drive.
It has a beach, which we enjoyed once. It also has amazing restaurants on the very edge of the lake, on built-up piers. It’s perfect for a late-night dinner watching the sunset on the west side of the lake.
