Palazzo Aragona Gonzaga

Architecture

The ground plan of the building is irregular in order to fully occupy its street corner location. At first glance it appears to be rectangular, but closer inspection reveals that it is in fact an irregular pentagon.

The palace comprises five floors above a semi-basement. Its style is broadly based on Palazzo Farnese; the lower floors exemplifying the architecture of the late Renaissance found in Rome and throughout Lazio. The principal façade comprises five bays. The ground floor is pierced centrally by the entrance to a porte-cochère leading to an internal courtyard. The corners of the irregular building are accentuated by quoining, while shallow pilasters divide the five bays from the first floor upwards.

Externally, the ground floor shows banded rustication (very similar to that found in the Roman Palazzo Vidoni Caffarelli, built in 1515 and attributed to Raphael), while the floors above are of rendered ochre ashlar. In the custom of the time, the ground floor was designed for occupation by only horses, servants and domestic offices. Here on the first floor, the piano nobile, were the principal rooms. As in most Renaissance palazzi, the upper floors are reached by a broad stone staircase rising from the cloisterlike inner courtyard, this negated the need for the upper floor's noble occupants to ever visit the menial ground floor rooms.

The piano nobile contains an enfilade of principal reception rooms; the importance of these rooms is denoted on the exterior by the large size of the windows and their alternating segmental and pointed pediments.

The second floor is aesthetically divided from the first by a double band and it is quite possible that all above this band is a later addition. If this were the case, then the palace would have originally followed the simple two-storey design, which so appealed to Raphael. …

Occupancy

The building was most notably the residence of Cardinal Scipione Gonzaga, a scion of the Gonzaga family, who had ruled Mantua in Northern Italy from 1328. However, it is not for his piety or noble connections that the cardinal is chiefly remembered, but for his friendship and patronage of the troubled poet Torquato Tasso and his support, against other family members, for his cousin Saint Aloysius Gonzaga. Saint Aloysius stayed in the building from 20 November 1585 before renouncing his worldly possessions and rank and joining the Society of Jesus. To both Gonzaga and Tasso, the Cardinal's residence was a refuge in time of trouble.

Following the cardinal's death in 1593, the building changed ownership, and thus its name, several times. Passing through the hands of the Casate and Astalli o Staglia families, before being acquired by the Negroni and undergoing renovations and alteration. Following the Negroni it passed to the Vecchiarelli family. In the nineteenth century, it became the residence of Prince Theodore Alexandrovich Galitzin, the son of Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Galitzin (1772–1821), Russian Ambassador to Rome. Today, much of the building is sub-divided into offices and apartments. It is not open to the public.