THE STORY

Villa Lina is a place in the heart of ancient Etruscan Tuscia where Energy, Nature and Art have coexisted for centuries in a state of creative grace. An intact, centuries-old nature protected for five hundred years — a living natural and cultural landscape shaped by Renaissance families, in continuous energetic exchange with contemporary poets, artists and visionaries.

Paola Igliori, writer and filmmaker, is now its owner and curator: granddaughter of Lina Igliori, to whom her husband Ulisse gifted the estate for her 29th birthday, on July 18th 1929, during the grand inauguration of the garden's redesign commissioned from architect Raffaele de Vico — after purchasing it in 1922 from the Leali counts, who had owned it since the 17th century, when they came from Brescia to assist the Farnese princes with the ironworks.

Curiously, the estate had already been part of ancestral lands on Paola Igliori's mother's side — Angela Lante Montefeltro della Rovere — whose forebears (the future Pope Julius II) acquired the lordship of Ronciglione in 1477 on behalf of Pope Sixtus IV, also della Rovere — later sold in 1526 to the Farnese’s Princes.

Here, Paola continues her inquiry into the boundary between the visible and the invisible, the mirroring of the microcosm and macrocosm, and the alchemy of the everyday.

Perhaps also a legacy of her ancestors, who helped shape the Renaissance ethic of curiosity and interconnection. Her research — through books and films (see Wikipedia) — spanning art, the roots of creativity and the cosmology of nature, crosses cultures by passing down the knowledge of extraordinary contemporary visionaries, arriving at the living essence of the power of connection with Nature.

Visited by poets such as d'Annunzio and Trilussa in the 1930s, art historians Federico Zeri and Mina Gregori in the 1960s and 70s, cultural figures like Giulio Bollati, co-founder of Einaudi and Bollati & Boringhieri, and visionaries like Harold Szeemann — who compared Villa Lina to Monte Verità — the energetic exchange between multidisciplinary creative minds and its Genius Loci has never ceased.

Artists from Alighiero Boetti and Mario Merz to Sandro Chia (Paola Igliori's first husband), Jean-Michel Basquiat and Alessandro Twombly, as well as scientists — theoretical physicists Jeff Tollaksen (twice nominated for the Nobel Prize) and Andrew Jordan, co-directors of the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University — and many others have all been part of this uninterrupted creative dialogue