Villa Cappelletti (Colle Plinio)

At the top of Colle Plinio, where the Roman villa of Pliny is sought beneath the fields, stands Villa Cappelletti: a seventeenth-century neoclassical residence of the Bourbon del Monte and Cappelletti families, ringed by a park of cedars, fountains and artificial lakes. A private seasonal home, it crowns San Giustino's archaeology from above.

Why it matters

Villa Cappelletti is a private family residence on Colle Plinio. The Gregorian land register of 1835 is the oldest datable record of the villa. Its Bourbon del Monte coat of arms bears a barred lily, marking an illegitimate branch of the family. Its park, once laid out with a garden inspired by Villa d'Este and later reshaped, engineers a whole water system of three lakes fed by diverted torrents, one still used for irrigation and two powering the villa's own hydroelectric plant. Above all, the villa caps the hill of Pliny's villa: archaeological discussion has repeatedly placed the Roman residential core in its vicinity.

What to notice

The villa reads as three storeys of neoclassical regularity — pilaster strips, string courses, a disciplined facade with four symmetric niches intended for statues of the Four Seasons, never filled. Look for the seams of its construction: the older rear core in stone against the 1905 expansion in exposed brick, and the double-ramp staircase descending from the rear to the garden. The enclosing wall, about three metres high and decorated with archetti, runs to an iron gate between stone piers — the emblem of a still-private estate. Within, the municipality records century-old cedars of Lebanon, a bamboo grove, three fountains with water features, limonaia and greenhouse ranges, and the lakes: the largest of roughly 42,000 square metres irrigating the farmland, the smaller pair feeding the turbines installed by the current owner's grandfather and father.

Context and history

The building's documented life begins with the Catasto Gregoriano of 1835, where villa and garden are already recognisable, and the property belonged to the Bourbon del Monte until the mid-nineteenth century, when Benedetto Cappelletti took over through marriage into the family; their descendants, the Marchesi Cappelletti of Rome, still use it as a seasonal residence, with farming managed by a resident factor. The garden's history is a small essay in changing taste: originally inspired by Villa d'Este's terraced water gardens, its Italian garden was removed in the second half of the twentieth century in favour of an English lawn, while the hydraulic spectacle of lakes and fountains survived. The setting is older than the house: the villa occupies the crest of Colle Plinio, the hill where the vestiges of Pliny the Younger's Roman estate are traditionally located and have been excavated since the 1970s, and Roman coins have been found in the farmyard at the park's north-eastern corner. Proximity to Tuscany shaped the complex's cypress avenue, park and water features.