After years of legal wrangling, the sprawling Roman villa filled with masterpieces from antiquity to the Renaissance will hit the auction block Tuesday with a starting price of $534 million.

Transcript

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

For centuries, Rome has been an art lovers' paradise. There's one site, though, that has never been open to the public - a sprawling 16th century property with masterpieces from antiquity to the Renaissance. As NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports, the villa is at the center of an inheritance battle between a Texas-born princess and her stepsons, and it goes up for auction tomorrow, starting at 534 million bucks.

SYLVIA POGGIOLI, BYLINE: Until some 20 years ago, the Villa Aurora was virtually inaccessible. With chest-high weeds, would-be visiting scholars couldn't get beyond the high entrance gate. Now it's an easy walk up a gravel path to gardens dotted with Roman and Greek busts and a statue of the Greek god Pan by Michelangelo. At the top of the hill stands the 32,000-square-foot Villa Aurora. Built in 1570, it's recently undergone some restoration.

PRINCESS RITA BONCOMPAGNI-LUDOVISI: We started working on it little by little. And we did the exterior, and we did a new roof, and we did so many different things that made it livable.

POGGIOLI: Princess Rita Boncompagni-Ludovisi is the widow of his Serene Highness Prince Nicolo, who died in 2018. Born Rita Carpenter in Texas 72 years ago, she's had a colorful and varied life. Once married to Representative John Jenrette of South Carolina, convicted in 1980 for accepting a bribe in the Abscam scandal, Rita Jenrette scandalized Washington. Not only did she write about it in Playboy; she also posed for the magazine, wearing a feather boa. She then worked as an actress and real estate broker. Her biggest deal was selling the General Motors building to Donald Trump in 1998. But for the last 19 years, Princess Rita has dedicated herself to the Villa Aurora, raising revenues through private tours and making it accessible to scholars.

BONCOMPAGNI-LUDOVISI: So it was really a journey of love. Basically, we sacrificed everything, my husband and I did, for this house and for his family.

POGGIOLI: She's also made major discoveries. T. Corey Brennan, professor of classics at Rutgers, who has worked closely with the princess at the villa, recalls when she found an old chest stuffed with 150,000 letters.

T COREY BRENNAN: In the first 25 pieces of paper we fished out were 12 new letters of Marie Antoinette and 13 of Louis XVI, and we just kept on going. Louis XIV, Pope Gregory XIII, Pope Gregory XV - it just didn't stop, and it hasn't stopped.

POGGIOLI: The precious archives have since been digitized. But after her husband's death four years ago, a lien was put on the property. The prince's sons by a previous marriage contested their father's will that left 50% of the villa's value to his widow and her right to use it for life. After years of vicious disputes, an Italian court ruled in September that the villa will be auctioned.

Whoever ends up buying the Villa Aurora will become the owner of some of the most extraordinary works of Western art. For example, Princess Rita points to the frescoed ceiling that gives the villa its name, Aurora, which means dawn, by the mannerist master Guercino.

BONCOMPAGNI-LUDOVISI: Now, this is Aurora there in the center. And she's bringing dawn into the night, which - the Ludovisi felt they were bringing in a new age.

POGGIOLI: Our tour continues through room after grandiose room of frescoes and paintings of family members, including the pope who gave his name to the Gregorian calendar. A ride up an elevator built in the 1850s takes us into a small foyer with the only ceiling mural painted by the baroque master, Caravaggio.

This is...

BONCOMPAGNI-LUDOVISI: Jupiter...

POGGIOLI: ...Jupiter.

BONCOMPAGNI-LUDOVISI: Neptune - he's coming out of the ocean, riding the seahorse. And there is Pluto.

POGGIOLI: Seen from below, the nude, foreshortened figures create a dramatic perspective. The gods appear to be standing on the ceiling as Jupiter positions the Earth among the clouds.

BONCOMPAGNI-LUDOVISI: Sometimes I'll put my yoga mat - or have in the past put my yoga mat here and do my yoga beneath it (laughter) because you discover different things all the time. Oh, it's wonderful. It's wonderful.

POGGIOLI: But now the villa that's been in the Boncompagni-Ludovisi family for 400 years is to be sold. Brennan says it still has many gems to be discovered.

BRENNAN: It's going to be transformational, I think, for the history of both ancient art and also early modern art.

POGGIOLI: The danger, Brennan says, is that under new ownership, the artistic treasures of the Villa Aurora may become off-limits to the rest of the world.

Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAVID KITT'S "BETWEEN THRESHOLDS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Correction

An earlier version of this story mistakenly stated that researchers from the University of Georgia helped to survey the gardens at Rome's Villa Aurora. The researchers were from Indiana University.