Intro: While it's a truism in real estate that location is everything, this is so much more than that - this property has an extraordinary value-added potential in its most recent La Dolce Vita chapter of an American marrying into aristocratic Italian nobility.
Here's a snippet of the back-story written by Carlie Porterfield
"Rita Jenrette scandalized Washington in the 1980s when, as the wife of a disgraced congressman, she posed for Playboy. After reinventing herself as a New York real estate broker and eventually marrying into Italian nobility, she’s now saying arrivederci to the historic villa that’s been in her late husband’s family for 400 years. . .
[From the Real Deal: The first chance to buy the 9,000-square-foot property belongs to the Italian government, which holds the right of first refusal. A court auction for the property is scheduled to be held on January 18, La Repubblica reported.
Even if the bidding hits the listed price for the villa, it wouldn’t be the biggest residential sale in history. That mark is believed to belong to Hong Kong’s Ho Tung Gardens, which sold in 2016 for $657.8 million. ]
Meet The Texas-Born Italian Princess Who’s Selling A $532 Million Roman Villa With A Caravaggio Ceiling
"Seated in a parlor of her lavish villa in central Rome—where Caravaggio painted his only known ceiling mural and Galileo once gazed at the stars from the roof—Her Serene Highness the Principessa Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi is feeling wistful about selling her late husband’s ancestral home. . .
For years, Villa Aurora has been at the heart of a vicious inheritance struggle between the Texas-born Principessa and members of her late husband’s family that she says makes the drama on HBO’s Succession look like “child's play.” She has now resigned herself to auctioning the home on the orders of an Italian court ruling after years of legal battles since her husband’s death in 2018.
And if the villa sells for the court’s price, it would set the record for the most expensive home ever sold, topping the 2017 sale of a $361 million Hong Kong apartment complex on the Peak. Though she calls losing the home “devastating,” Villa Aurora marks another colorful chapter in Princess Rita’s dolce vita.
NOTE: Caravaggio’s only ceiling mural, “Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto” watches over a foyer, painted while the artist was still in his early twenties, before he killed a man in a duel and fled Rome. One art history expert hired by the court to appraise the ceiling, Sapienza University’s Alessandro Zuccari, estimated that the mural alone is worth about $350 million of the house’s astronomical price.
> Principessa Ludovisi grew up far from the tallest hill in Rome, but says she felt a connection to the Eternal City at a young age. She was born Rita Carpenter in San Antonio, the daughter of millionaire oilman C. Hunt Carpenter and Reba Garlington, an heiress to a cattle fortune. She visited Rome for the first time at 16 with her older sister. . .
> Long before she moved to Italy, the future Principessa was best known as Rita Jenrette, wife of Rep. John Jenrette, the Democratic congressman from South Carolina who was convicted of bribery and conspiracy in 1980 as part of the Abscam sting. . .
> The next year, as her marriage was ending, she posed for Playboy in a nude pictorial and wrote an accompanying essay, “The Liberation of a Congressional Wife” in which she described having sex on the Capitol steps one night after a late House session. Even before her husband’s conviction, the Principessa wrote in Playboy that while living in Washington, D.C., she had already “been found guilty of an equally serious offense: not fitting in.”. .
> The Principessa has since said that she exaggerated the nature of that night on the Capitol portico, telling the Washington Post in 2011 that it was “a romantic moment but not a salacious one.” She also doesn’t regret the Playboy photos, even with the scandal it caused in 1980s Washington. “If that's the worst thing I've ever done, then shoot me,” she says. “My husband, Nicolò, was always proud of me.”
> After leaving Washington, the Principessa tried reinventing herself as an actress in Los Angeles.
> She said one of her favorite jobs was working as a correspondent for the info-tainment series A Current Affair from 1988 to 1990.
> When that path stalled, she moved across the country again and made another career pivot—working for investment firm Bridgewater under Ray Dalio before becoming a high-rolling real estate broker in New York, so she didn’t “have to get married again to live decently,” she laughs.
> This time, she excelled—she estimates that she helped broker $1 billion of real estate transactions between 1995 and 2001, with deals spanning from the East Coast to Arizona.
> Her biggest deal came when she helped broker Donald Trump’s $800 million purchase of the General Motors building in 1998. Decades before his days in the White House, Trump made an impression on her when he told her, unprompted, that he was a billionaire
> It was during her time as a Manhattan real estate broker that she also met her second husband, His Serene Highness Prince Nicolò Boncompagni Ludovisi, then 61, through mutual friends in 2002. . .She was unimpressed. . .the two began dating and were married seven years later in 2009.
> . . .The couple moved into Villa Aurora shortly after they began dating and undertook the hard work of restoring the property, which had fallen into disrepair and was written off as beyond salvation by historical circles. . .
> Nicolò was a private person and hesitant about opening his family home, but she convinced him to share the villa with the world—or at least the occasional paid private tour. . .
> The two lived happily together until Nicolò’s death in 2018. “I couldn't have asked for a more wonderful life,” she says of her time with her late husband. . .
> As directed by the court, the Principessa would get half of the proceeds, while the other half will go to her late husband’s three sons from a previous marriage. The Italian government also has the right of first refusal and could step in to match the final auction price to buy the property. (A recent online petition has called on Italy’s Ministry of Culture to do just that.) It’s unclear if it will do so, especially considering the likely nine-figure price tag. The Principessa’s biggest hope is that Villa Aurora’s next owner continues the research and preservation work she’s poured into the home, and keeps it open to the public as she has for all these years.
After all, Villa Aurora still has plenty of mysteries to uncover, she says . . .
“It's going to take a billionaire to do this,” she says. “Not just a millionaire, a billionaire to come here and bring this back to its former glory. I just hope and pray that this billionaire, whomever this person might be, sees the value of the history of this house.”
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