‘Princess’ Rita (Jenrette) Ludovisi Is Evicted From Her Dead Husband’s Princely 400-Year-Old Family Villa

She’s got a few miles on the odometer, but the edgy, bright Texas-born Rita (nee Carpenter) Jenrette Boncompagni Ludovisi, widow of the late and very wealthy Prince Nicolo Boncompagni Ludovisi, has today finally succumbed to a courtly edict of eviction from the storied Ludovisi family’s Casino dell’Aurora, the only private villa in the world with a (commissioned) ceiling painted by Caravaggio. Her fight to stay in the house, an extremely well-documented one against the prince’s other heirs, the children of his first marriage, was a long one, lasting some five years since her husband’s death in 2018. She seemed every bit the measure of it, forthrightly keeping the house open to tours and publishing a book on the house and its world-famous ceiling — which had been a rarity even for Caravaggio since he painted it in oil. Which was just one of the reasons that the house was initially valued well north of $500 million.

Tutta Roma, and much of the rest of the world, had followed the internecine twists of the case for the last half-decade, so the Princess Boncompagni Ludovisi left the villa in a roiling crush of paparazzi and television reporters, shepherding her three white bichon frise into the taxi with her. According to the AP, the dogs were barking energetically and one escaped, only to be corralled by their unflappable and actually somewhat regal San-Antonio-born owner, who bantered gently with the assembled press.

A series of auctions of the house, its garden and its priceless ceiling had failed over the last years, the most recent one in 2022. But that did not deter the widowed Texas princess from setting about with fundraising initiatives and interviews publicizing the house.

It’s fair to say that the Italians — and specifically, Rome society — in all its rambunctiously colorful, and occasionally spectacularly bloody, thousands of years of intrigue reaching back to the Caesars, had never really encountered a Steel Magnolia of the sort grown in San Antonio. To say that the current Princess Ludovisi was unusual, and stuck to her guns Alamo-style during the many years of legal wrangling with her husband’s children, is an understatement. It’s for that reason that she was alternately loved and reviled in Rome, and it was to put a familial punctuation mark on her tenancy in the glorious and gloriously crumbling Casino dell’Aurora that one of her princely stepsons was there to observe her actual final exit from the house.

“I feel like I’m in a surreal movie,” said the apparently very well read former actress to the assembled press, “like Sartre’s No Exit.”