ABSTRACT
In the second half of the seventeenth century, Ippolito Lante Montefeltro della Rovere, Duke of Bomarzo, and his wife, Maria Cristina Altemps, scrupulously adhered to the established town and country seasons of the Roman aristocratic calendar and duly spent a good six months of every year in their villa at Bagnaia. The Lante della Rovere came from a Pisan merchant family. The young Lante couple stayed at Bagnaia from the autumn of 1684 to the end of 1685. Under Louise-Angelique’s influence, various aspects of life at the villa underwent a process of transformation and adaptation to the French taste. Louise-Angelique kept up an active epistolary correspondence from Bagnaia, notably with her elder sister, Marie-Anne de La Tremoille, Duchess of Bracciano, then living in the Pasquino Palace, in Rome’s Piazza Navona. Social divertissements and company were not Louise-Angelique’s sole source of pleasure: she also amused herself in private.
