The princess battling to keep a €300m roof over her head

Whatever else may happen to her, there can be no doubt that the life story of Rita Carpenter, 72, correctly styled as La Principessa Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, will one day be told on screen. Visually, it’s got it all, from the Playboy centrefolds (two of them) to the ceiling painting by Caravaggio, the only one in the world, in which your eye is drawn straight up into the naked crotches of the three figures, all self-portraits (‘he certainly didn’t over-embellish himself…’). Nor is the tale short on drama: when our conversation turns to Succession, the HBO series about a squabbling billionaire family, she shrieks, ‘That’s nothing! Not compared to what I’m going through.’

She is referring to the ongoing litigation with the three adult sons of her late husband, the Principe Nicolò Boncompagni Ludovisi, whose lineage goes back to the Holy Roman Empire. Soon after his death, in 2018, his heirs began to question her right to stay in the Villa Aurora, the family palace in Rome. She insists the Prince granted her the right to remain for her lifetime, but in fact court documents show that he had already signed away two thirds of his estate to two of the brothers, Ignazio and Francesco, in 2008. He later wrote a will leaving half of the remainder of his estate to his wife, although not specifically mentioning the Villa Aurora. As no agreement can be reached, a judge last year ruled that the villa should be sold at auction, and that she must at that point move out. A buyer has yet to step forward despite a huge price drop.

To arrive at the gates of the Villa Aurora is to understand why a family might tear itself apart over a piece of property. It occupies almost an entire block just off the Via Veneto, which, when it was built in the 1880s, cut through what had been the house’s 42-hectare gardens, through which Stendhal liked to stroll ‘with delight among the grand avenues of green trees’. Julius Caesar himself built his palace on this hillock, up which a gravel drive now meanders through gardens featuring a statue by Michelangelo and a cedar under which Henry James wrote some of his memoir Italian Hours.

The house is a white stuccoed former hunting lodge dating from 1570 and stuffed with treasures, including Galileo’s telescopes and a cache of letters written by Marie Antoinette to Cardinal Ignazio Boncompagni Ludovisi, an ancestor. It was extended in 1858 to its current 3,000sq m formation and boasts nine rooms with ceilings by masters such as Guercino, Bril, Viola, Domenichino and Pomarancio, as the Principessa will later recite with a sweep of the arm.

Olga, the Ukrainian housekeeper, ushers me into a frescoed vestibule where the Principessa is dressed head-to-toe in black, like a traditional Italian widow, her platinum blonde hair coiffed. In black stilettos she leads me across uneven marble floors to a small frescoed drawing room hung with portraits of Popes Gregory XIII and Gregory XV, both also ancestors of her late husband. She is meek, her soft, girlish voice not the Texan drawl I had hoped for. One of her greatest pleasures today is to have Olga’s grandchildren living with her, newly escaped from Ukraine (she shows me videos of them on her phone).

When she first saw the Villa Aurora, in 2003, the house was in a terrible state. Indeed, according to her friend, the Rutgers University art historian T Corey Brennan, it is because of the Princess that the house is back on the cultural map. And he says it should be saved for the state and turned into a museum. ‘This is a cultural landmark, the Sistine Chapel of the 16th century,’ he tells me over the phone from Princeton. ‘Had it not been for Rita, it would still be overgrown and undiscovered as it was when she first saw it. They had only cut the grass twice between 1967 and 1993.’

When Rita Jenrette, as she was then, met the Prince, he was living elsewhere and had little interest in restoring the villa. But she has a love of history, and after they married, in 2009, she threw herself into research. She invited experts from the Universities of Oxford and Bologna to work on the house, insisting that they stay for free and buying pizzas to fuel their efforts. When she opened it to the public in 2010, it became a sensation, visited by everyone from Madonna to George Soros.

‘The site of the house has so much history, from Julius Caesar to Caravaggio to Nathaniel Hawthorne,’ says Brennan. ‘Leaving aside the art, at one point it had the most spectacular gardens in Rome.’ Her proudest achievement is to have created a digital archive of 150,000 items. She has also discovered a tunnel in the basement that leads to the Villa Medici next door. ‘I researched it, and Cosimo de’ Medici said, “I will only dine with Cardinal Francesco Del Monte,” who was second owner of the villa, and who was Caravaggio’s mentor. Isn’t that amazing?’

The ceiling by Caravaggio – which is not strictly a fresco, being painted in oil on to dry plaster – was discovered only in the 1960s, having been whitewashed over possibly as early as 1621, when the villa last changed hands, bought from Francesco Del Monte by Ludovico Boncompagni Ludovisi, from whom Prince Nicolò was descended. ‘The fact it was covered up so long ago is probably what has preserved it so well,’ says Brennan. According to the Principessa, ‘People knew of a fresco somewhere by Caravaggio because it had been written about back in the 17th century, but because Francesco Del Monte had so many palaces, people weren’t sure where it was. Then one day some experts spotted what looked like a gold frame and a Caravaggio self-portrait, so they removed the whitewash and tested it and carbon-dated it and proved that it was.’

To see the fresco, we get into a tiny wooden lift – ‘the oldest in Rome’ – and emerge into a narrow room that, after the grandeur and formality of the ground floor, feels decidedly intimate. Three muscular naked gods, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, are wrestling with various planets, dogs, an eagle and a horse. The allegory refers to Copernicus’s then heretical theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun. It is not a soothing vision, although fascinating – not least as you wonder how Caravaggio managed to paint upside down while looking up at his own genitalia, or someone else’s. The Principessa recalls showing it to a diplomat, who immediately averted his gaze. ‘This would be banned in Texas today,’ she says, laughing.

Showing people around the Villa Aurora is her passion. She has an astonishing knowledge of Italian art and art history, and probably knows more about the house and its family than anyone. ‘It’s like what Margaret Thatcher once said to Ronald Reagan: “You Americans are so lucky because you live a dream, and if you dream, it can be. Whereas we here in Europe have thousands of years of history, of baggage, weighing us down.”’ But she is fascinated by history and can trace her own lineage to a family from Lancashire, as she tells me over tagliatelle Piombino, a favourite parsley- and caper-flecked pasta of her late husband, who originally hailed from Piombino in Tuscany. So to live in what is in effect a museum – which this would be if it were in any other country – is like a dream come true for this self-confessed geek.

That’s probably not, however, how the readers of Playboy thought of her when they opened the April 1981 issue. But undressing was, she says, a form of rebellion, specifically against her then husband, John Jenrette, the Democrat South Carolina congressman she had married six years earlier, who went to prison for taking bribes and was, she claims, unfaithful. Born Rita Carpenter, she had begun her rebellion even earlier. Her father had been a cattle rancher turned businessman, and giant slabs of meat made regular appearances on the dinner table. One day she refused to eat it. Commanded to sit there until she finished her food, she eventually fell asleep with her face on her plate, and was finally allowed to go to bed. And so began her life as a vegetarian (she remains one today).

After school she went to the University of Texas, applied for the Peace Corps and protested against the Vietnam War. Her parents were therefore delighted when a quarterback called Skip Ward asked her to marry him. To please her parents she accepted, but the day they were to send out the invitations, she was accepted into the Peace Corps and called off the wedding. ‘I just couldn’t marry him. I said to him, “You’re a wonderful person but I have places to go, people to meet, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be a good wife to you.”’

She worked in Washington as a political researcher for the Republicans, but that ended when she met Jenrette, whose opening gambit was, ‘Well, then, how would you like to go to the Virgin Islands with me? We’ll lie in the sand nude all day long and make love all night.’ She said no, but he persisted and they married in 1976.

Jenrette was later found guilty of receiving a $50,000 bribe in what became known as the Abscam scandal. Rita took revenge by writing a blistering tell-all diary in The Washington Post detailing the ‘endless parties, drop-your-clothes-at-the-door orgies, alcoholic bashes, the cocaine, the call girls – and call boys’ that she had witnessed. Then she revealed even more for Playboy. Soon afterwards, she left Jenrette, and began working in television, first as a reporter then as a chat-show host, which perhaps explains her willingness to talk to me now.

In the 1990s she discovered that trading real estate in New York was a good way to make lots of money, which she did, selling the General Motors building to Donald Trump. Which is how she came to meet her prince: he read an article about her in Crain’s New York Business magazine and decided she could help him turn a property he owned outside Rome into a luxury hotel resort. The couple got together in 2003; three years later she had two brain tumours removed, which left her deaf in one ear. They married in 2009, when she was 59 and he in his late 60s.

Now she is living in a state of suspense as she awaits the next sale, due to take place on 30 June. The villa is being auctioned on an Italian government website more usually used for probates and insolvencies, or as Brennan puts it, ‘where you’d sell a Fiat 500 confiscated in Caserta’. It is, he says, ‘the most incompetent auction that has ever been held. It’s like putting Blenheim Palace on eBay.’

It was first put up for auction in January with a starting price of €471 million but had not a single bid. Was it overpriced? ‘Actually, I don’t think so,’ says Brennan. ‘The price is about right. Because first of all this is a two-acre site right in the heart of Rome. Even if it had nothing on it, it’s worth a lot. Next of all, there hasn’t been a house like this come up for sale since the 1890s.’

A second auction in April invited an opening bid of €377 million, but still no takers; the third will start at €300 million. Brennan suggests the Princess would like to make the Villa Aurora an arts hub in a private-public partnership that could help invigorate this neighbourhood, which has become a bit tired since its La Dolce Vita days in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the fight goes on. And yes, a film is being made about her. What, I ask, does she see as the best outcome? ​​‘Ideally, someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or one of their rich wives would come along and buy it, and keep me on in my top-floor apartment as a tour guide.’ Which, in a life as varied and colourful as hers, seems really quite possible.