NEW YORK, NY.- Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi wasted no time in pointing out the selling points of her home, the Villa Aurora, a 16th-century estate, smack in the center of Rome, loaded with masterpiece paintings, historical archives and noble family lore.
In the entryway, the princess — a 72-year-old Texan with blond hair, unwrinkled porcelain skin and pearls dripping onto her black overcoat — noted that the crimson cloth baldachin hanging over pictures of her late husband was found “only in homes that descend from popes.” In the dining room, she admired the mythical deities painted by Guercino “ushering in a new dawn,” and a bust of Julius Caesar, on whose ancient gardens she said the villa is built.
Upstairs, she leafed through a 1975 book about Republican congressional districts that she helped write; accused a rival family member of physically threatening her; and peered at a Caravaggio painting on the ceiling of a onetime alchemy lab where she sometimes does yoga and sets up romantic dinners for VIPs.
“Full-frontal nudity,” said the princess, a former Playboy centerfold, looking up at the full-frontal nudity of Caravaggio’s Roman gods. She recalled the time she spotted the ghost of Caravaggio “in a loincloth like Tarzan” haunting the grounds and wondered if the drab and peeling paint buried other masterpieces on the villa’s walls. “I kind of like the lived-in nature of a 500-year-old house,” she said.
“Princess” is only the latest title for a woman who has lived multiple lives.
She started as a Texas rancher’s daughter who became a political opposition researcher, and went on to be a congressional wife; a boa-clad pinup; a horror film starlet; an infotainment TV correspondent; a real estate agent; and, until recently, a tour guide of the villa where she lived with her third husband, Prince Nicolò Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, who died in 2018. She had hoped that would be her last act. Instead, she may soon be forced to make another move.
An Italian judge, sick of tit-for-tat lawsuits over her husband’s inheritance, has ordered the former hunting lodge to be publicly auctioned. January’s asking price: $531 million. Bidders: zero.
The princess' toxic inheritance battle, her American pedigree and the villa’s unique features (see: Caravaggio on the ceiling) have drawn incessant attention from global media charmed by the trappings of a Roman fairy tale, with the Texan landing a dream role as a Roman princess. But in reality, this paragon of American hustle and reinvention joined a decadent and dysfunctional aristocracy clinging to its titles and property, both eroded relics. Even her dilapidated villa stands as a monument to faded glory and Roman decline.
For now, Princess Rita can stay in her third-floor apartment with her four bichon frise dogs — George Washington, Henry James, Gioia and Milord. But she can no longer charge for tours to support herself. She spends a good deal of time keeping warm next to a little space heater next to the cold radiator (“I haven’t turned it on in a while”) and fuming about what she sees as betrayal in an epic noble family feud. She is contesting hundreds of thousands of dollars that the prince’s family is seeking in unpaid rent.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” the princess, who has seen quite a bit, said of the inheritance battle as she paused on a winding Baroque staircase. She insisted that her husband’s will gave her half of the entire estate and asserted that as a widow, she had absolute right to stay put.
“It’s sacrosanct,” she said, adding that she believed her stepsons and their mother were hoping to drag out court proceedings “until I kick the bucket or something.”
She argued that the restoration of the villa was her priority, and that a potential buyer — she hopes Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos might surface for the next auction in April — would have no problem with her as long as “they treat me with politeness” and don’t “flip it.” She suspected funny business in the auction process, having heard through friends that one of the “wealthiest people in America” whose “wife loves art” was blocked from participating.
But if the rare Caravaggio ceiling painting has cursed the villa with a significant overvaluation, the princess feels terribly undervalued. “I sold Donald Trump the General Motors building,” she said, recalling her commercial real estate iteration. “So why not use me?”
Born Rita Carpenter, she described herself as a bookish young girl who dreamed of becoming a Mousekeeter, but who ended up as an opposition researcher in Washington instead. There, she met Rep. John Jenrette, D-S.C., who immediately proposed that they sunbathe naked together. They married in 1976. But he philandered incessantly, drank even more and got busted in the infamous Abscam scandal.
She in turn posed in Playboy and published “My Capitol Secrets,” in which she detailed Washington’s “drop-your-clothes-at-the-door orgies.” It was around then, she said, that Roger Ailes offered her a job in television, as a Washington correspondent. She chose acting instead, and appeared in off-Broadway plays, on the television show “Fantasy Island” and in films like “Zombie Island Massacre.”
In 1986, she appeared in an episode of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” which led to a job offer from “A Current Affair,” the salacious television news weekly. At that point, she decided the big money was in real estate, and that led her, in 2003, to a meeting with Prince Nicolò, who was interested in developing a hotel on one of his properties.
Despite being married to his second wife, he was also interested in her. She moved to Rome to be with him and pitched in by giving tours of the villa. (“What am I now, a kept prince?” she recalled him saying with a laugh.) She overcame a brain tumor in 2006 that cost her hearing in her left ear but that also, she said, brought her much closer to the prince.
“We’re amazingly fragile as human beings,” said the princess, who walked gingerly on the tattered steps to the villa’s terrace. “But we’re also amazingly resourceful.”
The couple married in 2009. She dedicated herself to charities and the digitizing of a family archive including correspondence by popes and letters by Marie Antoinette (“hot to trot,” she said as she donned white gloves and unfolded one of the French queen’s brittle letters).
What the onetime romance novelist (“Conglomerate,” 1985) depicts as a great love story had a plot twist in 2015, when the prince’s second wife, Princess Ludmilla Boncompagni Ludovisi of St. Petersburg, Russia, began foreclosure proceedings on the villa, because her former husband had stopped paying her alimony.
That was no surprise, according to Prince Bante, one of the three sons from Prince Nicolò’s first marriage. He described his father as a drunk wastrel who chased women, squandered a fortune and sold off family treasures to pay for the minimum of essential renovations. He refers to his father’s widow as Ms. Carpenter, a “gold digger” who lives in the “peasant” quarters of the villa — and much, much worse.
Prince Bante said he and his brothers, who are also disputing the inheritance among themselves, became convinced that Princess Rita did not have their father’s best interests, or longevity, at heart, and that she let him drink himself to death in 2018. Princess Rita pointed to run-ins with the law by one brother and a fraud conviction against another. She called Prince Bante a “borderline personality” who once laid hands on her, an accusation he denies.
For the princess, the past few years have been a constant battle.
In December 2020, as she recovered at home from a fall that broke her kneecap and arm, the stepsons, joined by Italian Cultural Ministry officials, entered for a random inspection of the villa, which is an Italian cultural treasure. They found a leak and required that it be immediately repaired, prompting the princess, she said, to call the restaurateur Nello Balan, namesake of the Manhattan hot spot Nello’s, to whom she has been romantically linked. (“We’re very, very good friends,” she said coyly.)
She considers the inspection tantamount to a home invasion.
As she walked under a Murano chandelier with a single working bulb, past livery uniforms under plastic, she said her husband had tried to warn her about his children, who had shown “not one scintilla of appreciation” for all she had done for the house. To save money, she said, she and her husband had given up vacations and gifts for each other. She added that she hadn’t been able to do some of the things she had wanted back in America for “years and years and years because I’ve been stuck here — I mean,” she corrected herself, “not stuck here.”
But amid all of the nastiness, the thing that seems to bother her the most is Prince Bante’s charge that she is not a real princess, that she is not one of them. Back in the sitting room, where a lone Ukrainian maid, Olga, responded to her call by draping an old black mink coat over “the principessa,” the American reached for the Almanach de Gotha, a thick yellow directory of Europe’s royalty and higher nobility.
“This is the Bible of nobility,” she said, opening to a picture of her and her late husband. “And there we are.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
