Fabio Gigone granted a fellowship from The Danish Institute in Rome

Chigi’s Italian Versailles

Fabio Gigone was granted a fellowship from The Danish Institute in Rome to commence archival research at the Biblioteca Apostolica and at the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano in summer 2023. The aim is to explore the Chigi family’s archives in order to reconstruct the history of the Villa Versaglia in Formello, Rome. The building, now in ruin, was built between 1665 and 1666 after cardinal Flavio Chigi's diplomatic visit to Versailles in 1664. In that period, the project of the actual Versailles was still under development; therefore Versaglia represented one of the early examples of the influence of Louis XIV’s visionary project on the Roman context. The archival research is the spin-off of Fabio’s actual PhD research project "States of Proximity - Privacy under Louis XIV in Versailles, 1682-1715”.