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INTRODUCTION

‘Villa Wolkonsky’ is the name given since the late nineteenth century to an unusual and largely unknown property on the eastern fringe of classical Rome but now in the heart of the modern city. It lies at the eastern end of the ridge known as the Caelian, one of the Seven Hills of Rome, at the spot indicated by the arrow between the red and black lines in the map at Plate 1. Many Romans who live, work or study in the area remain unaware of what lies behind the Villa’s gates and high retaining wall. The thousands of visitors who annually travel to that part of the city direct their eyes mainly at the nearby great Basilica of St John in Lateran (San Giovanni in Laterano) just within the third-century Aurelian Wall, and at a second fine basilica, the Holy Cross of Jerusalem (Santa Croce in Gerusalemme), a few hundred metres north-east along the Wall. Because it has been home to two embassies for most of the last one hundred years, it rarely features on modern tourists’ lists. That is a mixed blessing, as this narrative will explain. The paradox is that only by remaining largely private and therefore unknown for the last hundred years has the Villa retained its character and been lovingly looked after. Within the Villa’s grounds are two principal buildings and numerous smaller houses and other structures, contained within a walled park of mixed woodland and garden, all dominated by 36 spans of a first-century imperial Roman aqueduct. In 1830, the property, then simply a vineyard, the Vigna Falcone, was bought as a going concern by a remarkable and gifted Russian princess, Zenaïde Wolkonsky. She transformed its single small cottage – built onto the aqueduct – into a summer house, modest by the standards of the Russian and Roman nobility. Thanks to her son’s further judicious purchases between 1868 and 1878, the land area of the property grew to be much larger than it is now. It soon shrank again, as some northern tracts and much of the new additions to the east were sold off, partly for road realignment but mainly to finance the costs of building a new, large mansion on the estate between 1886 and 1891. The boundaries by 1920 were much as they remain to this day: enclosing a still substantial 11 acres, or 4.5 hectares (see Plate 3). After the princess’s purchase the Villa Wolkonsky was not sold again until the German government bought it for use as its embassy to the then Kingdom of Italy in 1922. In the meantime the name Vigna Falcone had been replaced at various times by ‘Vigna Celimontana’, ‘Villa Celimontana’ and ‘Villa delle Rose’. The name ‘Villa Wolkonsky’ only began to appear in travellers’ tales, guides and maps in the 1860s. The first appearance I have found on a map is from 1869, in an English map by John Murray. References in Baedeker in the 1870–80s and Augustus Hare, writing in the 1870s and, later, in 1902, suggest that by then the name was in general use. Even so, the permission to build the new villino (mansion) in 1886 referred to the Villa Celimontana, presumably its official designation at the time. Introduction

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Part of the Villa’s special charm now is that it is almost hidden from the city by apartment blocks, tucked away behind its walls and trees – paradoxically – on the top of its ridge. It is officially designated a private park (parco privato). Its unique feature is a long and well-preserved stretch of imperial Roman aqueduct, forming a central roughly north-east–south-west axis through the estate, which since the early twentieth century has been roughly kite-shaped. Along the Roman road that ran beside the northern flank of the aqueduct are several Roman tombs – 6 m or more below today’s ground level – a few of which have been excavated. One remains exposed within the property, and three more can be seen from outside. Antiquity apart, the story can be divided into four separate phases: 1. the Wolkonsky years in the first summer house or casino, 1830–78 2. the Campanari-Wolkonsky years, 1878–1922, from 1891 in the new, larger mansion or villino 3. the German years, 1922–44, during most of which the estate was the embassy of the Reich, with the villino being enlarged between 1938 and 1940 into a veritable palazzo 4. the British years, 1947 to the present, during which it has been and remains the UK’s Embassy to the Republic of Italy, though since 1971 only the residence and other accommodation remain there, as the offices returned to their former site at Porta Pia. The Villa’s successive owners have had to work hard to create and maintain the buildings and the extensive grounds. That effort has yielded a very special by-product: the preservation and conservation of a historic estate in the heart of Rome, with many of its Roman and later contents, in spite of the impact of two world wars and dramatic economic and political upheavals. The owners have adapted the buildings and grounds to their purposes but by and large respected the conservation ground rules laid down first under papal rule and subsequently codified and watched over keenly by the Italian authorities. The achievement of that conservation has been a mix, sometimes uncomfortable, of passion and effective rules, certainly far from wholly accidental. It has to be said that the papal authorities’ acquiescence in the grafting of the princess’s little country villa directly onto the aqueduct (and, even more, her son’s later modifications to it) would not have passed muster in later years. The Italian authorities have often reminded the successive owners about the ‘vincoli’ (chains) which limited what they could do to the estate without permission, displaying very little flexibility, but in practice allowing some, not least in the 1930s, a stance from which all parties have by and large benefited. In the British years, however, many of those in London responsible for the public purse could not accept, in the face of much evidence, that realisation of the apparent capital value of one or other of the two sites the UK had come to own in Rome could or would be frustrated by precisely that insistence on the rules – even as they became gradually stricter. They did not realise the depth of the sense of responsibility for the country’s cultural heritage the Italian authorities had developed. An especially significant feature of the story is the dedication of four German ambassadors to the upkeep of the house(s) and the grounds during a period when, at least until the very late 1930s, the German economy was in a parlous state and the government strapped for cash, to say nothing of the preoccupations of ambassadors in the 1930s, as Germany moved Europe, including a reluctant Italy, towards war. The first of the four, Konstantin von Neurath, who acquired the Villa for the Reich in 1922, is credited with having spent a good deal of his own money on it, especially the garden. Some of the others may have done so too. All certainly strove to ensure that the government in Berlin did at least the minimum needed to prevent the main residence from crumbling and, finally, to enlarge and 12

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modernise it. Particularly in Neurath’s case this sensitive, almost romantic engagement clashes with the course of his career after leaving Rome, during the Nazi period: he ended up a convicted war criminal, held responsible for the atrocities committed in Czechoslovakia after that country was annexed to the Reich. The Axis between Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany and the brief period when it was transmuted into a harsh occupation loom over that period of the story. While the Villa’s story sheds a light on some aspects of that political history, this narrative makes no attempt to take political and moral positions about individuals, just as it does not try to summarise the two hundred years of European history, which have washed over or past it and its occupants. Indeed, if there is a theme for the second part of the tale, it is more modest: how, through the turbulent twentieth century there seems to have been a dogged undercurrent of determination to do well by the place, come hell or high water, when with hindsight we may judge many individuals’ moral compasses to have been defective, and resources were practically always insufficient. This has applied also to the years of the UK’s tenure, though the moral (as opposed to financial) pressures have not been comparable.

Introduction

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1. AQUEDUCTS, BASILICAS AND CHAPELS The Roman aqueduct The Villa Wolkonsky is defined by the Neronian branch or spur of the major aqueduct known as the Aqua Claudia. Thirty-six of its spans stride for 350 metres from north-east to south-west (the direction of the water flow, right to left in the image in Plate 13) across the Villa’s park, forming its main axis. The branch was built around AD 62 to a plan probably conceived under Emperor Claudius but executed by Nero (AD 54–68). It has defined, dominated and shaped the landscape of the Caelian ridge. Princess Zenaïde Wolkonsky might well not have bought the property nearly 1,800 years later, had those dramatic arches not stimulated her vision of the garden she could create around them. The aqueduct is the first star of this tale and cannot be left out. Nor can the spread of the city to the south-east over the centuries following its construction, as that (in spite of 1,000 years of decline and neglect) also shaped the environment which made attractive to nineteenth-century sensibility the patch of land we now call the Villa Wolkonsky. Paradoxically, the aqueduct we see still standing after nearly 2,000 years was not very sturdily built. From its early years it needed frequent repair. Its arches were regularly reinforced by infilling, sometimes crude. That was sufficient to give it the strength to survive for many centuries. After a major conservation exercise, led by the antiquities team at the UK Ministry of Works (MoW) in the late 1950s, it might well stand for another few. Such optimism is based partly on the main reason why it has withstood the ravages of time so well: although its two tiers of arches were originally too weak to support a double channel on the top, the lower tier has for centuries been almost entirely buried – and protected – by the accumulation of detritus of various kinds. With very minor exceptions the lower tier within the Villa grounds has never been excavated. By some accounts the aqueduct remained operational on and off for as many as 800 years, though 400–500 seems a more likely, yet still remarkable figure. All who live in, work at or visit the Villa, itself barely 200 years old, cannot but be conscious that they are in the presence of 2,000 years of history – and of a monument to the engineering skills of imperial Rome. How the aqueduct fitted into imperial Rome’s extraordinary and complex water system is illustrated in the map at Fig. 1.1. It was built alongside an earlier, underground section of the republican city’s water supply – several conduits (spechi) known as the Rivus Herculaneus of the Aqua Marcia – some of which ran along the Caelian ridge, serving properties at its western end, but not apparently reaching its high point. Sections of it have from time to time come to light. Later additions to the Aqua Marcia and the Aqua Julia serving the central parts of the city also almost certainly ran partly in underground channels to the Caelian’s highest point.1 The development of the city as an imperial capital under Augustus and his successors, with the demands of their palaces, gardens, fountains and lakes on and around the Caelian and Palatine Hills, rendered that system obsolete.2 Emperor Claudius (AD 41–54) completed two aqueducts begun by Caligula in AD 38: the Aqua Anio Novus and the Aqua Claudia, both of which came from near Tivoli; when they joined some 7 km from the city walls they were carried by the same arches but remained in separate channels, passing through 14

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Fig. 1.1. Rome’s water supply system in Frontinus’s time, showing the Aqua Neroniana snaking from right to left along the Caelian ridge to the huge cistern at Claudius’s Temple, then across the valley to the Palatine Hill. Extract from a map by Piranesi (1756). what is now known as the Porta Maggiore, where they were joined on a monumental triumphal arch – which was still well outside the city walls. The arch to this day carries an inscription recording completion in AD 52. Immediately before that arch a branch channel was led westwards (through what became the grounds of the Villa Wolkonsky). Most of the work on that branch is ascribed to Nero, a widely accepted view supported by the statement of Frontinus (the great second-century Roman manager and historian of the city’s water supply) that Nero took it as far as Claudius’s Temple, i.e. not all the way to the Palatine.3 Historians and archaeologists are unsure of several key aspects of the origins of the branch aqueduct: a) when it was built, though it is widely acknowledged as being built by Nero, with AD 64 now being replaced by AD 62 as the likeliest date; b) whether the extension to the Palatine formed a part of Emperor Claudius’s original scheme to bring additional water to the city from the mountains to the east, the most likely explanation for its great height; Aqueducts, Basilicas and Chapels

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c) whether the ‘bridge’ across to the Palatine was contemporary with the original design and construction or a later addition, its construction being traditionally ascribed to Domitian (AD 81– 96); d) by what hydraulic engineering techniques the water was moved across the valley between the Caelian and Palatine Hills – free-flowing water carried on conduits held up on four levels of arches or an inverted siphon, perhaps on two levels of arches. In modern times the seminal work on the city’s aqueduct system was carried out by Thomas Ashby and John Ward-Perkins, successively Directors of the British School at Rome (BSR). A summary relating to the Palatine and Caelian Hills was incorporated in the report by Baillie Reynolds and Bailey on the UK-led restoration project of 1959–60.4 But they understandably skated over many of the uncertainties not relevant to their mission. Since their day much more work has been done, but the riddles remain largely unresolved. Some useful ground-clearing was done in a 2003 survey by Ian Madelin.5 He noted that the spur had often been referred to as the Arcus Neroniani by archaeologists, but the only ancient evidence for the name itself was Frontinus’s reference to the arches ‘which are called Neronian’. Rather, it had normally been dubbed the Arcus Caelimontana or Caelian Aqueduct. Madelin found equally little basis for the habitually cited completion date of AD 64. Frontinus and other sources had neither dated it nor offered evidence about its purpose. Madelin judged improbable the notion that Nero built it in AD 64 after the disastrous fire of that year to improve fire-fighting supply to the Palatine where his new palace was being built: it would have taken longer than the remainder of the year to build, and was anyway unnecessary because the existing supply was adequate for fire-fighting. Furthermore neither the remaining structure nor the nearby properties showed traces of the AD 64 fire, which contemporary accounts suggested had started at the south-east corner of Circus Maximus and spread northwards. That reasoning would allow for the aqueduct’s existence before the fire.6 Furthermore, the AD 62 date is related, as Madelin pointed out, to the inscription on the Porta Maggiore which claims that ‘Vespasian in AD 71 at his own expense restored to the city the [Claudia] waters tapped by the deified Claudius but interrupted and in ruin for nine years’. That clearly suggested that Nero did something in AD 62 which interrupted the Aqua Claudia and allowed it to fall into disrepair for a long time, covering the very period when the Caelian spur was thought to have been constructed. Madelin suggested that Nero had merely completed in AD 62 the project started by Claudius and perhaps took more water from it for his own uses than originally envisaged, as he built his own new palace, the Domus Aurea, on the Caelian after abandoning the Palatine and also wanted a reliable way to fill the artificial lake he had built to stage mock naval battles – where the Colosseum now stands. If this deprived the main Aqua Claudia of its full supply for any length of time it could have fallen into disrepair, and so Vespasian opportunistically claimed credit for doing the neglected essential maintenance occasioned by the weak construction of the original, thus making a bit of self-serving propaganda at the expense of Nero’s reputation. Madelin also noted that Herschel (the first to translate Frontinus into English and a hydraulic engineer), had recorded that all the aqueducts, even new ones, were constantly out of commission for repair. Work on the Claudia was recorded in AD 52, 71, 80 and 84. A similar approach was advanced by Tucci in 2006, adding that ‘to compensate’ for Nero’s diversion of the Claudia to the Caelian and beyond, the supply to the Caelian through the Marcia and Julia aqueducts was diverted to supply the area north of the Porta Maggiore.7 The scheme drawn up by Claudius for a spur aqueduct off the Claudian along the Caelian ridge was on a scale and with a water quality that pointed to it being primarily designed to improve the 16

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time) formally acknowledged to Neurath the sale for L.1,227,284 gold or L.5.7m paper (Fig. 5.6). Four months later the press reported that it had been sold to the Fascist Party. A figure for the Germans’ share of the proceeds has not surfaced, but there is no suggestion that they were let down. In 1926 the Demanio’s sale to the developer was recorded in the Land Registry, with a contract date of 19 July 1924. Issues of taxes (L.15,308) on the Vidoni rents (L.75,506) took a couple more years to resolve; and the Land Registry were still demanding but not getting some unpaid fees (L.51,000) in 1935. But the book had finally been closed on the Palazzo Caffarelli, and in 1925 the Germans had some money to spend belatedly on the Villa Wolkonsky. One further loose end came to light. For all the complexity of the 1922 contract of sale, the lawyers did not do their due diligence properly. A deed to amend it had to be drawn up and signed on 14 May 1926. A state-owned developer, Società Immobiliare per la Compravendita Fig. 5.6. Mussolini (as foreign minister) acknowledged to the German di Beni Immobili nel Regno d’Italia, in- ambassador on 26 February 1925 the sale of the Palazzo Vidoni (the tending to develop a parcel of land proceeds from which the German government would take as (3888, on the via Statilia side – see Fig. compensation for the loss of their previous embassy in Rome). 5.7), which it had owned for 30 years, discovered that it had mistakenly been omitted from the registration of its sale in the Land Registry in 1889 and thus Princess Nadeïde had retained certain (unspecified) residual rights over it, which had been transferred in the 1922 sale to the German Reich, even though the plot itself was not listed among those which made up the property sold, an error neither party had then noticed. As the Land Registry showed the certain rights over the plot now rested with the German Reich, the plot was judged encumbered and the developer was unable to obtain the loan finance he needed for his plans. The Germans agreed to release it for a token sum of L.1,000, by a declaration that it lay outside the retaining boundary wall of the land that went with the Villa, and the developer paid the legal costs. That was the last change to the boundaries to have been made, though a spectacular effort to do so in 1943–4 was frustrated by the course of the Second World War (see Chapter 10). During those years the property was in the charge of four of Germany’s five post-war ambassadors: Konstantin von Neurath (1921–30), Carl von Schubert (1930–32), Ulrich von Hassell (1932–8) and Hans Georg von Mackensen (1938–43). The time and effort each of these ambassadors, their wives The Germans Find a New Embassy

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Fig. 5.7. The loose end: the parcel of land (3888) sold by the Campanari-Wolkonskys in 1889 and wrongly included in the Deed of Sale to the German government appears (top, middle) in this German sketch-map of re-wiring work from 1935. and senior staff put into the maintenance, conservation and, eventually, enlargement of both the main house and the casino/Chancery, even in years of crisis and war, is striking. Their lengthy exchanges of correspondence with Berlin, the annual circulars about expenditure cuts and the arguments why this, that or the other work needed to be done regardless, bore the strongest possible resemblance to those exchanged with London in my day – and no doubt still by my successors.

Notes 1

The main sources for this saga are as follows: German (i) Palazzo Caffarelli AA (a) (Pol) R130761, Vols 1–3, (b) Rom 1265a Caffarelli 1920–26, (c) Rom 428g Caffarelli 1920–21; (ii) Palazzo Vidoni AA (a) Rom 428d Vidoni 1920– 22, (b) Rom 1265a Pal. Vidoni 1923–5, (c) 1265a Vidoni 1921–35; and (iii) on the personnel involved AA (Pol) (a) 009214 Vol 7 Rep IV Pers.162 , (b) Pers g Box 3 file 6/3. Italian Foreign Ministry (Farnesina) files (iii) X Personale Germania I and (iv) X Personale Germania I Legazioni Esteri in Italia. 2 See (i) (b) at note 1 above. 3 See (i) (a) Vol. 1 at note 1. 4 See (iii) at note 1. 5 Recorded in a paper dated 20 December 1918. 6 While Rosen was being asked for his account, the AA produced an interesting memorandum on GermanRussian contacts at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. 7 De Martino to Herff on 6 April 1920. 8 1928–31 (AA file 429a). 9 NdS 1917, Fornari, p. 174. 10 The plan annexed to the contract did not survive, but a later internal German use of a copy of the Land Registry plan of 1934 reveals what most of these numbers represent.

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6. THE TWENTIES: PENNY-PINCHING YEARS FOR NEURATH In 1921/2 Germany’s parlous economic condition, not helped by the expected impact of reparations, did not allow the government even to contemplate spending large sums on rebuilding embassy residences abroad. In pushing the purchase, primarily in order to bring to an end the long wait for a new embassy building, Neurath did warn that much work needed to be done to bring the Villa up to scratch after years of relative neglect as a rented property during difficult times. But he may have judged it counterproductive to make too much of this before the purchase had gone through. Correspondence with Berlin had also not focused on its likely annual running costs. Inevitably, little money was available to run the house during Neurath’s tenure, contrary to the myth prevalent in many post-war accounts of the period, which assumed that the Germans had from the start set about embellishing and enlarging both residence and offices. 1923 was nonetheless a year of some ambition, which may go some way to explaining the myth. Bickel of the Reichsbaudirektion (Reich Building Directorate) submitted a plan to the Belle Arti that year. No trace of it has yet been found in either German or Italian accessible archives.1 We do know that it included a floor plan of a planned expansion of the Residence, dated 1 February 1923, but frustratingly no copy has come to light. We do not even know whether it covered the whole estate or only the Residence. The Belle Arti was subsequently recorded as having approved in that year the addition to the Residence of two wings, presumably the main feature of the 1923 plan. It would not have been unreasonable to draw the conclusion – as many have – that they had therefore been built. But that is not what happened.

The Officials’ House One relatively minor project does seem to have been successfully executed at the outset. The building situated against the far western boundary of the property and, like the casino, incorporating a (small) portion of the aqueduct was described in the Land Registry until the sale to the Germans as stables and garages – and bore the registry number 272. But by 1930 it was described in the inventory submitted to Berlin for the 1931 financial year as the ‘Officials’ House’ (Beamtenhaus), comprising two flats, totalling 250 square metres (Fig. 6.1). Other evidence (for a fuller account see Chapter 21 on the refurbishment by the British government of the secondary buildings at the Villa in the 1980s) strongly indicates that the Germans converted and enlarged the existing stable block into two flats in 1923/4; but that conclusion cannot be substantiated by any identified bids for or records of such expenditure in that poorly documented period. The Italian architect involved in the British refurbishment of this house in the mid-1980s opined in a historical note that it had probably been built (new) by the Germans between 1934 and 1939. This view was based on its ‘absence’ from certain maps up to that of 1934. But we know that part of the building

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Notes 1

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was most marked on the economic and commercial front and with the addition of new defence and other sections. The old casino was soon to prove inadequate to the demands of the mission. By the 1930s additional premises elsewhere had to be hired (or after 1938 simply taken over). They were eventually supplemented by ugly prefabricated single-storey huts in the woodland north of the Chancery. But there is no record of major works to accommodate additional staff in the casino itself until Hassell came back to the scene. In different economic circumstances enlargement of the office block would have been a natural priority during Neurath’s long tenure. Not all its 18 rooms were of a size to be made into offices. But the evidence points to ambassador and staff having had to put up with it as it was for over a decade. In 1927 Neurath sought authority for an automatic Siemens telephone exchange at a mere L.10,700, to stop the operators of the Italian manual exchange listening to all their calls; and the restoration of the ambassador’s cramped office to its original size by the removal of an unventilated, un-soundproofed cubicle with no natural light, used by the Private Secretary (‘Attaché’).2 Nothing was revealed about where the Private Secretary would be accommodated instead, but Dahms in the Reich Building Authority (Reichsbauverwaltung – RBV: note the change of name if not of function of the office which, under the control of the finance minister, was responsible for the Villa Wolkonsky) approved on the basis that Neurath would finance it by not resurfacing the chancery approach road (a bid which therefore reappeared for 1929). Such minor adjustments strongly suggest that no major extension project had yet been launched by 1929. In a letter to Berlin in early 1930 Neurath pointed out that much had been saved in terms of later repair by the fact that the windowsills were replaced at the outset – implying that the building was otherwise little changed. The same letter described it as a three-storey office building: Alexander’s own enlargement of the house, described in the Land Registry as four-storey with 18 rooms, might in practice have made it a three-storey building, as the top floor was little more than a roof-terrace. Unfortunately when Hassell began to campaign for its enlargement he did not say how many rooms it had by then, but we do know that after enlargement works of the 1930s it had 26. The eventual and inevitable enlargement of the casino may have been foreseen and applied for in the 1923 application to the Belle Arti. But it could equally have been the subject of a second, cursorily documented application to make ‘alterations’ submitted in 1933. But the budget application for 1934 gave no detail other than listing the ‘minor’ (further?) extension to the Chancery to be carried out that year, and then, after Hitler’s assumption of the Chancellorship in 1933, there was an immediate expenditure freeze. However, Hassell in 1937 did propose the Heraufstockung (addition of one or more floors) of the Chancery. And more clarity is to be found in a 1942 memo which states that the old Villa Wolkonsky chancery had a) been enlarged by the addition of a cellar and an upper floor between autumn 1933 and autumn 1934; and b) had two storeys added between late autumn 1936 and summer 1937. Any work before 1934 had been mere tinkering.

The Residence (villino) Whatever the plan submitted to the Belle Arti and approved in 1923, the two large wings at the east and west sides of the villino were not added until the major extension project was carried out under Mackensen in 1939–40, just as the Second World War began. It is important to be clear about this, given the received wisdom, based on the submission of the request to the Belle Arti in 1923, that the work began from the outset. A British plan of the Residence from 1948 (updated in 1966) shows the The Twenties: Penny-pinching Years for Neurath

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of the head gardener, Gherardi, who by 1930 had been working there for 45 years, since before the new villino had been built. But he did much of the supervision himself (partly because Gherardi had become old and lazy, even if still valuable). There is no reason why Neurath should not have displayed such sensibility, yet that makes it all the harder to square the Neurath of the 1920s with the Neurath who, after two years as ambassador in London (1930–32), became foreign minister from 1932, remaining in that position under Hitler until 1937 and, because of his subsequent role as ‘Protector’ in Czechoslovakia, was sentenced at Nuremberg to 15 years in jail. During most of their tenure ambassadors had to argue with Berlin for every penny, for the garden (and the gardeners), the house, on which so little could be spent when it was purchased, on household furnishings and equipment – even on newspapers for the Chancery. In the 1920s the state of the economy and the devaluation of the Reichsmark as hyperinflation took over made financing the Embassy very difficult, and the crash of 1929 only made things worse. Once the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – National Socialist German Workers’ Party or Nazi Party) regime took over, resources were mainly de- Fig. 6.2. Konstantin von Neurath, German voted to other priorities. So those who held the purse ambassador to Italy 1921–30, on the terrace steps strings in Berlin were constantly trying to impose and of the Villa Wolkonsky, leading down to his beloved sustain expenditure cuts or freezes, and the tone of garden. the ambassadors’ correspondence with them, the arguments they used, the complaints they made, all bore a strong resemblance to those of the British years, also marked by a succession of (British) economic crises and financial cuts. Personal relationships, then as now, could play a role. Neurath must have been particularly well supplied with contacts in the various administrative departments, as he had been the senior official responsible for administration in the AA for the year before his posting to Rome in December 1921. He clearly had a good relationship with Curt Schaefer, the senior official in the RBV. Schaefer was in post for many years, though not perhaps as long as Neurath. He came to stay at the Villa on a private visit with his wife before leaving the job in 1929. His successor, Dahms, was also in post for years and evidently took his responsibility for the upkeep of the Villa seriously in spite of the economic chaos of the times. In 1930 a separate, more powerful body, the Reichsbaudirektion (RBD), was set up – yet another change of name; and its Berlin office dealt with government buildings in Berlin and abroad. The RBD Berlin became the crucial department for practically all technical and cost aspects of work on the property, including design, need, cost estimates and specifications (e.g. for a new main electricity cable). Without their green light (including authorisation to the AA to spend specified sums from its own budget on specified works/purchases) nothing could happen. The Twenties: Penny-pinching Years for Neurath

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Such detailed supervision, while necessary, was bound to make things slow. Once Hitler came to power the RBD was also the body used by the architect Albert Speer to carry out his plans for the new, triumphalist Berlin and other such schemes. But its Berlin department also retained responsibility for the overseas estate, i.e. embassies and cultural institutions. With or without Speer, the RBD had considerable clout. Occasionally the supervising Finance Ministry was directly involved, e.g. in authorising expenditure on the major projects being considered for the Villa in 1938/9 and the early 1940s. The RBD sometimes needed to get clearance from the Finance Ministry for lesser works as well, when the government’s budget was under particular pressure. But normally the RBD was the deciding authority. The AA administrative officials could of course be important allies of the ambassador in securing funding and authorisations. Neurath would have needed all the help he could get. Diplomatically he was in fairly hostile territory as the enforced move of the German Legation from the Palazzo Caffarelli on the Campidoglio and the subsequent mess-up had so emphatically demonstrated. Neurath’s posting may have been occasioned by the need for someone with a grasp of administration and finances to oversee the move into the Villa. His career spanned the two world wars, and he played roles in both. He was a lawyer by training (like many of his contemporaries), brought up and schooled near Stuttgart, followed by university at Tübingen and Berlin, in the days when it was normal for German students to attend several universities in the course of gaining a degree. He first joined the AA in September 1901 but left in 1916 for ‘war service’ as Private Secretary to the King of Württemberg. After the war he returned to the AA in February 1919 and served briefly as minister in Copenhagen. When Neurath finally left Rome in 1930 it was for London as ambassador. He had served there in the consulate from 1903 to 1908. His tenure was shorter on this occasion. In 1932 he was appointed foreign minister by Chancellor Franz von Papen. Having joined the NSDAP and later the SS (the latter against his will, he claimed at Nuremberg), he retained the post under both von Schleicher and Hitler, until 1938. He was widely regarded as lending some respectability to Hitler’s expansionist policies. Whether during his time as foreign minister his affection for the Villa meant that he was prepared to help his successors squeeze the necessary resources out of a tight budget is not revealed. Eventually his overtly expressed concern that Hitler was leading the country into war exasperated the Führer and allowed the ‘champagne salesman’ Ribbentrop (also ex-London) to manoeuvre to replace him. Ribbentrop had in any case been running a parallel policy as foreign affairs chief within the party hierarchy, leaving Neurath with little more than the formal side of the job. In 1939 Hitler made Neurath ‘Protector’ of Bohemia and Czechoslovakia following the German invasion; but in spite of presiding over many acts of repression he was again sidelined in 1941, when Hitler concluded he did not deal severely enough with local opposition to German rule. He was suspended (after a personal interview with Hitler) and effectively replaced by Heydrich, though he remained nominally in office until 1943. Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in June 1942. At Nuremberg in 1946 Neurath was found guilty on all four charges against him, including crimes against humanity as Reichsprotektor, his defence that the acts of repression were the affair of the police, especially once Heydrich had taken effective control, having failed to protect him. Neurath was released in 1954 on health grounds and died in 1956. None of this later history can easily be associated with the passion Neurath reportedly showed for the Villa and its garden. After his departure the temporary chargé, Smend, recorded in a letter of 30 August to Berlin that Neurath ‘always oversaw the garden work himself and regarded it as very important’. (Explanations were constantly needed, not least in the annual submission of the budget for the following year, about why an embassy residence needed to employ a team of four or five gardeners. Similar repetition was required to get across the message that the German Reich had bought 108

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The court also queried an overshoot of L.100,000 on a bill for the erection of a retaining wall to protect the estate (and of course the secret archives and codes) and the gatehouse in the same year. This work formed part of what makes the property the almost hidden oasis it has become, especially as the trees have grown up so much in the intervening years. The Embassy’s response was a narrative with some charm. The quarter of the city around the Embassy was gaining a newly planned street layout, and the authorities wanted the steep sides of the Villa’s grounds to be held back from sliding onto the new streets. The Embassy had been fortunate to have the contractor building the new streets (De Rossi) do the wall and associated works at a considerable saving to the Reich. But that had involved cutting down or reducing numerous trees, making a new internal path, building new drainage (and a toilet for the gardener’s little house, poised almost on top of the wall). The drainage works had extended to another part of the estate to meet the (unspecified) complaints of a neighbour and avoid further claims for damages. All this had been authorised by the good Herr Regierungsbaurat (a rank, literally ‘official building counsellor’) Dahms to the tune of 20,000 RM, at that time L.120,000; but unfortunately by the time the bills had to be paid the ‘rise of the Lira’ (i.e. crash of the RM) meant that there had been an overshoot. The episode of the retaining wall had brought a small additional – and almost comical – silver lining, which the court also queried. Neurath had been authorised in 1926 to build a walled compost heap in the garden. But the street works and the retaining wall meant there was a ready supply of stone to hand, and craftsmen to work it. So the walled heap had been converted into a stone-lined pit, which Dahms had also authorised. The AA refused to send on to the Audit Court Neurath’s vigorous response to their query. This was partly because they did not like Neurath’s washing of ten years of dirty linen in public and partly because he had not confined himself to the queries about the 1927 financial year. By this time Neurath had moved on; his deputy repeated his case at even greater length. It contained interesting additions. The Villa had been known before the German purchase as ‘Villa delle Rose’ because of its splendid rose beds. No resources had been allocated for the garden at the outset. Neurath, ‘with love and knowledge and from his own resources, saw to the improvement of the garden’. The employment of the gardeners was justified simply on grounds of the need for constant watering to keep the garden alive. The retaining wall construction had taken into the estate a semicircular area known as Piazza Sclopis (the junction of via Ludovico di Savoia and via Giovanni Battista Piatti, which had required extensive extra earth-moving and drainage works. With the arrival of Neurath’s successor, Schubert, the niggling seemed to stop – probably because Schubert could simply draw a line under the past and was not interested in the garden – but he was followed by a circular announcing a strict 10 per cent cut in the household equipment budget.

Notes 1 AA file 1541a Vol. 2, covering 1929–31, provides the main documentary source for this chapter, supplemented by references to the period in later documents. This reflects the lack in official German archives of papers relating to the Foreign Ministry and its embassies abroad in the 1920s, as a result of the dispersal of the archives at the end of the Second World War. 2 This room may have been that shown in Fig. 3.12, if that was indeed the principal reception room of Alexander’s house.

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