The Piccola Farnesina, Rome, around 1911

A King at Home

Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling.

—G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World

Professor D. is ecstatic. The Palazzo Piccola Farnesina, so-called with flamboyant inaccuracy, is finally free of scaffolding. It’s the first time he’d seen it in two years. We stopped by there this morning in the middle of our Monday morning walk-cum-lecture for Architectural Theory Class. I’d noticed it the day before when I crossed the Corso Vittorio Emannuelle and was astonished to discover a pleasant-looking new Renaissance building that had deposited itself in the middle distance just beyond Sant’ Andrea della Valle, squarely in the crook of the wide street’s distant curve.

I’d assumed I’d just been unobservant up until now until we found ourselves in front of the tiny palazzo and D. excitedly explained how it had suddenly materialized there, free of tarpaulins and construction workers.

It’s a bit hard to take in at one glance. A waggish soul would be tempted to call it ‘cute,’ or at the very least, strange. It is delicate, almost freestanding, and tiny, smaller in height and breadth than the neighboring bleached-white façade of the Palazzo Massimo alla Colonna or the gargantuan Cancelleria.

It’s also charmingly asymmetrical, the piano nobile stepping back around a high walled garden court facing south towards Piazza San Pantaleon. One wing of the u-shaped contrivance is a single bay, the other three or four at least, set with level but unequally-spaced windows.

Every detail is perfectly attended to, if perhaps slightly unconventionally placed, every molding in order with a certain Francophone elegance. The name’s confusing, as it brings to mind the real Farnesina, a pleasure palace (or “love shack” as my fellow arkie Cynthia irreverently calls it) built across the river and later bought up by the Farnese. Agostino Chigi was behind the construction, and anyway, the fresco cycle is a bit racier than this quaint little dollhouse of a palazzo.

It’s not really a Farnese palace at all, but instead the gigli or fleurs-de-lys that stud the banding of the façade are the insignia of a much humbler French churchman, Thomas Leroy. Sometime his home is called, appropriately enough, de Regis, a Latinization of his name taking it at face value: of the King. While French, his architect was Italian, the ubiquitous Sangallo the Younger.

The peculiar equilibrium of the cool if eccentric façade testifies to his genius, as well as those subtle details that threaten to upset the balance just enough to give it life, like a serpentine belt course neatly going up and over a set of paired windows. The stone itself seems as plastic as stucco.

When we look at our ideal image of the city, we’re used to thinking of ordinary homes as the background, the fabric, the civic bread-and-butter of the architect that serves as a demure stage-set for the great cathedrals and palazzi and monuments. Still, it is healthy to stop and look at this curiosity, if only to remind us that a man’s freedom is bound up in his home, and perhaps every now and then deserves to be manifested architecturally.

Chesterton once wrote something to the effect that only at home could we truly be free, do whatever we feel like, wear a dressing-gown and slippers or paint the rafters green: “The home,” he writes with his indefatigable charm, “is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. For a plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure.” Instead of rotting our minds with movie theaters and bar-hopping, a young man or young woman can turn to that great adventure that is the family instead. And sometimes that is literal anarchy, for better or worse.

Leroy exercised this whimsical freedom for himself and the greater good of his household. And ultimately, for the good of the city. The character of the Piccola Farnesina, perhaps, is not as canonically Roman as one might have wished, but for all that the Corso is enriched by its presence.

Modernism made two mistakes: one was to heard workers into soulless blocks of flats to shape the world of the future, and the other was to create a tetherless suburbia that seems to continually float on the edge of a dozen cities, neither green hinterland or solemn stony townscape. Neither understands this sacred whimsy, either substituting unfettered variety or dull monotony for the happy medium that is brought about through the simple unconscious genius of the craftsman.

Le Corbusier, that great Swiss watchmaker of an architect, once designed a block of pristine white apartments, their insides marked with none of that bourgeois clutter that was holding the working class back. They were clean, simple—free. Within two months, the forward-thinking proletarians had filled their new homes with false fireplaces, dusty Victorian furniture and God-knows-what-else worse. And so they were free.

Mies van der Rohe took it a step further, pressuring the condo board of one of his pet Chicago projects to decree that the residents could only keep their window curtains open, closed or precisely half-open. It’s a fragile architecture that can’t handle a little bit of dirt, grime or chance. It’s a fragile city that can’t handle the occasional deviancy from plan, the slight kink in the boulevard, the single eccentric arch or peculiar window-frame.

If you look at the work of the anonymous craftsmen that shaped the subtle fabric of the city of Rome, they know how to harmonize their buildings with the surroundings, but not at the expense of a spark of freedom, of dignity, even humor. Perhaps the Piccola Farnesina is a grander exemplar, a wilder exaggeration of this principle, but that does not make its reality any less true.

Thus Chesterton: “The home is the one place where [you] can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor,” if you so desire. Perhaps we don’t feel like it, but at least there is always that echo of a possibility as the rallying point for a free citizenry. Old Agostino’s love shack, full of courtiers and servants, was probably a far less free place than a humble little row-house on Via de Baullari, or perhaps even Thomas Leroy’s peculiar little palazzo with its wonderful, subdued whimsy.

He was a courtier, but a minor one, and his house, far less grand than the enormous homes of Papal nephews and black nobility is one of the first I’ve seen that has spoken of that search for gentle wildness that ends in domestic serenity.

We peered in through the grillwork of the garden entry, into a cozy entrance-court, a little barrel-vaulted hallway framed by a dainty Palladian motif, attractively scaled-down arches and pilasters and columns. The scale was as eccentric as the rest of the structure, the grand archway seeming far bigger than in reality. Walking through that archway makes you feel feel like a giant, a towering monarch. A king or a queen. De Regis. It’s not so strange. After all, isn’t a man’s house the one place where he should most feel like a king?