Palazzo Sforza Cesarini

Genzano's ducal palace closes the view down the town's tree-lined Olmate and steps down, through a romantic English-style park, to the shores of Lake Nemi. Bought by the Cesarini in 1564 and reshaped by two generations of the Gregorini architects, it is the town's most significant monument.

Why it matters

Palazzo Sforza Cesarini is, together with its park, the principal element of Genzano's cultural heritage — the building that turned a medieval borgo into a duchy's capital. The Cesarini family acquired the settlement in 1564 and organised its urban future around a modern statute and a planned street geometry: the Olmate, three straight tree-lined avenues in a trident, whose central axis ends precisely at the palace facade. Later dukes kept investing: the early eighteenth century brought a monumental new facade and an extra wing towards the lake, and the nineteenth century added the romantic garden that descends to the water. Few towns of the Castelli Romani preserve such a legible relation between a single family's patronage and the shape of the town itself, and the palace's hillside position overlooks the medieval quarter and the church of Santa Maria della Cima.

What to notice

The facade is visible from the end of the Olmate axis: the composition, modelled on the great Roman palazzi, is divided into two orders with windows that shrink towards the edges, an optical device that makes the long front appear to curve around the viewer. The portal is by architect Domenico Michele Magni and has deliberately deformed capitals. The lake-facing side reveals the building's growth: the wing added in the early eighteenth century and the rear prospect of the mid-nineteenth century show how the palace kept expanding away from its medieval core. Inside, the hall known as the Sala delle Armi is a ceremonial centrepiece. The English-style garden descends through terraces and winding paths planted with exotic species. Lake Nemi appears through the trees. The landscape dates to the 1840s–1850s.

Context and history

The palace grew out of the fortified enclosure of the medieval borgo: until the time of Duke Giuliano Cesarini (1491–1565), who bought the fief in 1564, the family's building clung to the castle walls beside the old gate. The dukes expanded it by buying adjacent houses, engaging the architect Francesco Peparelli (1585–1641) for the new ranges; engravings of the 1650s–1660s record the palace before its final growth. Around the start of the eighteenth century came the decisive campaign: a new body of fabric towards the lake, the raising of the building by a further floor, and the symmetric facade organised by Ludovico Gregorini (1661–1723), architect to the Cesarini, and completed after his death by his son Domenico Gregorini (1692–1777). The last great phase belongs to Duke Lorenzo Sforza Cesarini (1807–1866) and Duchess Caroline Shirley (1818–1897): between about 1846 and 1857 they commissioned restorations from the architect Augusto Lanciani and created the romantic English garden on the slope falling to Lake Nemi, closing the palace's long architectural biography. The municipality owns and manages the complex.