Celebrations at the top of the hill

The Finnish Institute in Rome marks up 50 years in the Villa Lante

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By Ritva Liisa Snellman in Rome
     
      "Forward and left, prego." The gatekeeper of the Monastery of the Sacred Heart of Jesus seems totally unfazed when a foreign tourist seeks to enter the monastery's vegetable garden just to get a view of a nearby building.
      In Rome, of course, eyeballing buildings is the rule rather than the exception, and the Finns in particular are absolutely nuts about Villa Lante, a building that once belonged to the monastery's nuns.
      In the serenity of the garden one can marvel at the harmonious proportions of the villa's arches. Some curious property deals of the not too ancient past also leap to mind.
     
For the Sacred Heart nuns, the selling of Villa Lante in 1909 to an Italian general was without question a blunder of gigantic proportions. The Finns, in turn, made the deal of a lifetime when buying the property 41 years later to serve as a cultural and science centre.
      Villa Lante is a protected building and a national monument. One cannot even begin to guess its price. Genuine Renaissance villas seldom end up in the property sales pages of local newspapers. No, not even in Rome.
      Access between the monastery and the villa has been closed off. One must return to the street, walk past a remand prison, and climb up a steep flight of steps to get to the Passeggiata leading up to the hill known as Gianicolo. Minding scattered piles of dog-poop, madcap scooter-riders, and the ever-present tourists is also advisable.
     
Villa Lante's luxuriously calm exterior is deceptive. Inside there is a bustle of activities of various kinds. This spring's course participants slog away in the seminar room. In the office, phones ring incessantly. This evening there will be a public lecture.
      The gate buzzer sounds. Spring is a time of excursions. Intendant Simo Örmä guides the members of the Rome Club from a senior secondary school in Turku out onto the terrace. Momentarily the ever-so-cool teenagers lose their composure as they sigh in astonishment at the breathtaking view.
      There it is: THE view! This is the one described and photographed by every visitor.
     
Örmä's skilful narration of Renaissance Rome, with Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael among the locals, paints a lively picture of a noisy and dusty city of 40,000 people.
      The rich would escape the city's heat to their summer palaces on the outskirts of town. Pope Leo X's chief secretary also coveted a villa on top of a hill. Villa Lante was completed in 1525, only 50 years after the medieval Olavinlinna Castle in Finland, the home of the Savonlinna Opera Festival.
      The loggia with its lovely arches is the highlight of every tour. No one seems to know exactly what the balcony-like space should be called in Finnish, but all visitors agree on one thing: it is b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l.
     
For a brief moment Villa Lante quiets down. Then a group of Finnish tourists rushes in. A visit to the Finnish Institute in Rome, which occupies Villa Lante, is part of a Finnish tour organiser's programme.
      Mika Kajava, the Director of the Finnish Insititute in Rome, sits reading in his office, the course participants have scattered into the numerous libraries of the building, and Simo Örmä is glued to his phone.
      There are only a few days to the 50th anniversary of Villa Lante under Finnish ownership.
      Though important to Finns, the jubilee may go somewhat unnoticed in Rome. The eternal city hosts no fewer than 21 foreign institutes specialising in research in the humanities.
      On the same week with the Finnish festivities, the German institute celebrates its 175th anniversary.
      In the office there is some friction. The fax machine seems to be in a whimsical mood, as is the Italian caretaker Giuseppe Zizi. Time for a quick exit stage left. There is still a lot to learn about other parts of the building.
     
From the street, Villa Lante appears to be a two-storey building, but its labyrinthine frame actually contains seven floors in all, plus courtyards and terraces on five different levels.
      The atelier is situated on the bottom floor, whereas the top floor houses the course participants' miniscule rooms and a kitchen.
      "For a researcher of the antiquities and the Middle Ages this location is ideal, since everything is close at hand", enthuse Liisa Suvikumpu and Tuomas Heikkilä, the residents of “the blue chamber”.
      But Villa Lante is hardly just a science factory and an archive-nerd oasis. Having a good time has always been part of the tradition. Tuomas Heikkilä recalls an old May Day incident.
      "Päivi Setälä was the director at the time. She complained about a tree in the hillside garden of the nuns casting an unwanted shadow over the windows. Well, we climbed over the wall at night, cut down the tree using a bread-knife, chopped it up, and dragged the crown into the living room as evidence. Bishop Eero Huovinen, who was one of the guests at the time, blessed it and Setälä was satisfied."
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 25.4.2004

More on this subject:
 Who owns Villa Lante?

Links:
  Institutum Romanum Finlandiae

RITVA LIISA SNELLMAN / Helsingin Sanomat
ritva.liisa.snellman@hs.fi