Palazzo Borghese

Palazzo Borghese is a palace in Rome, Italy, the main seat of the Borghese family. It was nicknamed il Cembalo ("the harpsichord") due to its unusual trapezoidal groundplan; its narrowest facade faces the River Tiber. The entrance at the opposite end of the building, the "keyboard" of the cembalo, faces onto the Fontanella di Borghese, with another in a great flanking facade to the Piazza Borghese that is extended by a slightly angled facade leading down Via Borghese towards the river. Both these entrances lead into a large courtyard on one side of which is a two level open arcade, with paired Doric and Ionic columns, that frames the garden beyond.

The first floor of the palace is the seat of the Embassy of Spain in Italy since 1947.

History

The architectural historian Howard Hibbard has demonstrated that the nine-bay section of the palace on Piazza Fontanella Borghese was begun in 1560/61 for Monsignor Tommaso del Giglio, whose coat of arms or stemma remain over the door in Piazza Borghese, and he suggests that the architect was Vignola,¹ an attribution accepted by Anthony Blunt,² considered conclusive by James S. Ackerman³ and followed by other scholars since, with more or less reduced interventions by Longhi. Before Tomasso del Giglio died in 1578, the façade and the unique but undocumented double-columned two-storey arcade of the courtyard had been established, a conceptual scheme of Vignola's, Hibbard suggested, but which was carried out in 1575-78 by Martino Longhi the Elder. Longhi was retained by Pedro Cardinal Deza, who bought the property in 1587, but seems to have done little more than continue the great courtyard.

Cardinal Camillo Borghese purchased the structure in 1604 and acquired further adjacent properties towards the river. When the Cardinal became in 1605, he gave the palace to his brothers but continued to commission the work, which was carried forward vigorously, at first by , and completed after Ponzio's death in 1613 by and . Ponzio extended the square courtyard from five to seven bays, and the oval stair between the courtyard and a garden that stretched as far as the Ripetta. He also constructed the secondary facade onto the Piazza Borghese and down towards the Tiber, with balconies above the rusticated entrance on the Via di Ripetta.