A Home in Rome: Villa Mills and the Palatine Hill

Abstract

Prior to the acts of demolition pursued in the ventennio to recover and celebrate the heirlooms of antiquity as the simulacra of a fascist restoration of the Roman Empire, a Gothic Revival villa stood atop the Palatine Hill. A transhistorical palimpsest, this edifice incorporated a portion of the imperial palace that was erected for Domitian after his accession to power (AD 81). Through the disclosure of groundbreaking archival documentation, this article reveals that the Gothic Revival mansion, commonly known as ‘Villa Mills’, can be renamed ‘Villa Smith’. It was Robert Smith (1787–1873), a lieutenant-colonel of the East India Company, who embarked on the medievalist makeover rather than the previous owner, a fellow Englishman named Charles Andrew Mills (1770–1846). In spite of an exceptional location in the imperial heart of the Eternal City, knowledge of the nineteenth-century history of the site is very limited and tends to be derived from hearsay and hypothesis, rather than primary information. Drawing on broad textual and iconographical sources, this article aims to fill this gap by reflecting closely upon the relationships in pre-unification Rome between architecture and political and cultural intent, between Italy and Britain, and between modernity and antiquity. After a reconstruction of British presence above the Domus Augustana and an investigation of the person behind the neo-Gothic reworking, the study offers a critical reconsideration of Villa Mills and the character of (Charles Andrew) Mills.