History

This place has had a long history of activists, artists, poets, scholars and spiritual people!

It has been for 5 centuries owned by the family of the Counts Leali ( in 1798 Jacobins then Garibaldians) who come in the 17th century from Brescia to help the Farnese princes with the management of the ironworks ( Alessandro Farnese had completed in 1575 the Renaissance wonder of Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola at 8 km away, started by his grandfather Alessandro before becoming Pope in 1534, and they had started an innovative “ industrialisation”  with paper mills and ironworks utilizing the energy from the emissary of the Vico Lake) 

The Obelisk of St. Peter's Square in Rome was raised with the rods from the Farnese ironworks in Ronciglione.

The property was purchased in the 1920s by Ulisse Igliori who together with his wife Lina (extraordinary and visionary woman) commissioned the great architect Raffaele De Vico , to re-design the garden in grand style , and who, at the inauguration in 1929 , gifted the estate to his wife Lina for her 29th birthday! 

Massimo Igliori later married Angela Lante Montefeltro della Rovere ( discendent of one of the beginners of the Italian Renaissance : Federico da Montefeltro) of the family that sold in 1496 the lands of Vico and Casamala to the Farnese on which the Palazzo Farnese was built, the family for centuries continued living in the other Tuscia Renaissance wonder: Villa Lante in Bagnaia. 

Their daughter Paola, our current curator (who therefore has many Tuscia insider stories)began to take care of Villa Lina at the age of 20. 

Artists,scholars and innovators have resided here for generations: the poets Trilussa and d'Annunzio, the painter Donghi, the Rosacrucian great architect Raffaele de Vico who created in Villa lina a unique symbolical garden, Padre Mariano da Torino....with Ulysses and Lina Igliori from the 30s to the late 60s.

Great Art historians Federico Zeri ( who created the Getty Museum in L.A.) Giuliano Briganti, Sir Anthony Blunt with Massimo Igliori in the 60s and 70s.

With Paola Igliori (who married artist Sandro Chia in the 80s) many great artists and innovators....from Mario Merz to Alighiero Boetti, from Jean Michel Basquiat to Cy Twombly, at home, like the co-founder of Einaudi Giulio Bollati, Harald Szeemann and Eddy de Wilde ( mythical museum curators), to Bella Freud,stylist, graddaughter of Sigmund and underground singer Nick Cave, both English, equally at home as

Scientist Eloy Rodriguez, Chair of bio-diversity at Cornell University, Spiritual researcher Ron Young and Activist John Trudell co-founder of the American Indian Movement A.I.M. 

In the past ten years with Filippo Chia ( Paola and Sandro’s son who directs “ Castello Romitorio” and resides between Montalcino and Villa Lina) : Artist Lola Schnabel, Cedric Von Sydow, Solange Azaguray Partridge, Assisi Jagger… 

In 2008 Paola Igliori married African Artist Massamba Fall Sy of the Sufi Baye Fall brotherhood, who also resides part-time on the Estate.