The magnificent historic villa that was the home of Benito Mussolini when he was the all-powerful Duce of Italy has been reopened to the public after nearly 30 years of restoration.

The nine buildings and gardens of the Villa Torlonia, which were largely built in the 19th century by the Torlonia princes of the Vatican aristocracy, will now house an art museum dedicated to the Roman school of 20th-century painting.

The complex will also house a high-tech playground and a museum of the Holocaust, dedicated to the 2,000 Jews who were deported from Rome during the German occupation of 1943-44.

The villa was taken over by Allied occupying forces at the end of the Second World War and later suffered years of neglect, becoming a haven for drug users, homeless people and vandals, as Mussolini’s legacy remained controversial.

Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome, said: “Its historic weight should also be evident to visitors, because a true democracy has no need to discard a part of its history.”

The villa was rented to Mussolini for the nominal sum of one lira a year in 1925, and remained his home for much of his dictatorship. As warclouds gathered Mussolini had a large gas-proof bomb shelter built beneath the main building, with rubber seals on the two-inch-thick steel doors and filtered air intakes.

This, too, is now open to visitors.

After the war Villa Torlonia was occupied by the Anglo-American military command, whose soldiers did considerable damage to the decor.

They left, however, works of art of their own; two large murals, one of a banjo player and one of a Hawaiian dancing girl. Alberta Campitelli, who supervised the restoration, said: “We have preserved these, as part of the villa’s history.” The villa was bought by the City of Rome in 1977 and in 1978 it was opened — in a pitiful state — to the public as a park.

The buildings were boarded up and surrounded by ugly corrugated iron barriers, but they were inevitably penetrated by the homeless, drug users and vandals, who did further damage. The villa complex stands alongside the ancient Via Nomentana, where many of the noble families of Rome built homes in the 18th century which at the time was about two kilometres outside the city walls.

In the early 19th century Giuseppe Valadier, one of the greatest architects of the period, undertook a radical renovation and development of the buildings and the transformation of the vineyards into formal gardens.

The buildings and gardens were enlarged further and re-built so that today there is an amazing variety of architectural styles, reflecting the tastes of various epochs.

They range from the purity of Palladian Neo-Classicism, evident in the main Casino Nobile building, to the folly style found in some of the smaller houses, such as the Art Nouveau Casina delle Civette (House of the Owls) and the mock-Renaissance Villino Rosso.

In 1919 it was discovered that the villa stood over an underground Jewish cemetery from the Ancient Roman period, and its main chamber, richly decorated, can now be visited.

After languishing for decades, the buildings and the gardens, set in peaceful tree-lined avenues with ornamental pools and fountains, are once more fully open to visitors.

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